CiteULike: oamg causality

Causal inference in multisensory perception.

KP Körding — 2007-09-28T16:43:01-00:00

PLoS ONE, Vol. 2, No. 9. (2007)

Perceptual events derive their significance to an animal from their meaning about the world, that is from the information they carry about their causes. The brain should thus be able to efficiently infer the causes underlying our sensory events. Here we use multisensory cue combination to study causal inference in perception. We formulate an ideal-observer model that infers whether two sensory cues originate from the same location and that also estimates their location(s). This model accurately predicts the nonlinear integration of cues by human subjects in two auditory-visual localization tasks. The results show that indeed humans can efficiently infer the causal structure as well as the location of causes. By combining insights from the study of causal inference with the ideal-observer approach to sensory cue combination, we show that the capacity to infer causal structure is not limited to conscious, high-level cognition; it is also performed continually and effortlessly in perception.

Intuitive psychology and physics among children with autism and typically developing children.

L Binnie — 2006-05-12T18:39:06-00:00

Autism, Vol. 7, No. 2. (June 2003), pp. 173-193.

Many studies have documented poor understanding of intuitive psychology among children with autism; however, few have investigated claims of superior understanding of intuitive physics said to be evident in this group. This study aimed to investigate the reported differential preference of intuitive psychology and intuitive physics among children with autism by employing three tasks each with a psychological and a physical condition. In order to gain a detailed developmental picture the study compared children with autism, an age matched comparison group, and typically developing preschoolers, 7-year-olds and 10-year-olds. Results demonstrated that children with autism preferred to employ physical causality when reasoning about novel physical and psychological events. Furthermore, their performance on a multiple-choice task confirmed their impairment in intuitive psychology whilst highlighting a superior ability to reason about physical phenomena in relation to all other comparison groups. The theoretical implications of this potential cognitive strength are discussed.

Social cognition: an early impairment in dementia of the Alzheimer type.

CM Verdon — 2007-04-13T16:08:36-00:00

Alzheimer Dis Assoc Disord, Vol. 21, No. 1. (r 2007), pp. 25-30.

OBJECTIVE: A core component of social functioning is the capacity to attribute mental states to others and to understand intention as psychologic cause. The hypothesis of this study was that dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) patients show an impaired understanding of psychologic cause although they remain able to understand physical causality. METHODS: To test this hypothesis, 20 elderly adults with DAT, 20 healthy age-matched controls, and 20 healthy young adults were presented a cartoon task requiring them to process physical or psychologic cause of events. RESULTS: Patients with DAT at onset scored significantly lower than controls when they had to reason about psychologic causation, while they did not differ for reasoning about physical causation. Consistent with these results, patients with DAT showed significantly lower scores in psychologic reasoning as compared with their scores for physical causality. Instead young and elderly healthy adults scored similarly for the 2 types of causality and the 2 groups did not differ in their scores. These results suggest that impaired understanding of intention in others may be considered as an early socio-cognitive index of onset of DAT. A post hoc division of the group of patients with DAT into 2 subgroups according to Mini Mental State (MMS) scores showed that the group with the more severe MMS scores not only had lower scores for psychologic causality but also showed impairment in reasoning about physical causality involving persons. Physical causality involving objects remained relatively preserved. CONCLUSIONS: The remarkable deficit in attribution of intention in our patients with DAT at onset and the following deterioration of their performance in reasoning about physical causality with persons may reflect progressive dysfunction of the superior temporal sulcus in Alzheimer disease.