OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Causal perceptions power much of our behaviour and are a trans-diagnostic feature of mental health. While memory provides the building blocks of our experience, causal linkages allow us to make sense of the world and express our agency. Causal knowledge is necessarily built upon simple associative cues to causality with interventions providing further instrumental evidence about our causal effectiveness. However, cues to causality can lead to both causal illusions and delusions. I present some new experiments designed to explore causal enhancement using the Rapid Streaming procedure in humans. Participants in these experiments experienced rapid presentation of content neutral stimulus-stimulus contingencies designed to explore how ‘empty time’ can enhance causal perception. In previous work using standard learning procedures causal perception is enhanced by increasing contiguous pairings of events and by increased ‘empty time’. I will discuss whether these experiments are coming up against the boundary conditions under which causal perception is enhanced and diminished.