David Schwitzgebel¹, Alon Hafri²; ¹École Normale Supérieure—Paris Sciences et Lettres, ²University of Delaware

Many causal interactions involve the transfer of force from an Agent to a Patient, such as when one object strikes another, causing it to move. These events have been studied extensively in the context of Michottean launching, which has shown how causality shapes visual inferences about a Patient’s spatiotemporal properties, including position, direction, and speed. However, causal events often involve more than just force transfer: a wet towel can moisten skin, an ice cube can cool a drink, or a paintbrush can impart its color to a surface. While we can reason about such “property transfers,” does the mind make rapid visual inferences about them? Here, we asked whether participants are sensitive to the rapid transfer of a property unrelated to force: color. Participants completed a continuous sequence of trials involving causal launching events with color changes. One object (either the Agent or Patient) started as orange or purple, while the other object (the “probe”) began as gray. Upon contact, the probe object changed to either orange or purple. Crucially, the probe’s color change was independent of the other object’s color. The task was go/no-go: respond only when the probe changed to the participant’s pre-assigned target color (before timeout). Response times were fastest when the probe was the Patient, the Agent initially had the target color, and the probe turned that color. Thus, launching events induced a visual expectation that color is selectively “transferred” from Agent to Patient in causal events. This interaction persisted throughout the experiment, suggesting that it was insensitive to task familiarity. Follow-up experiments found that disrupting the timing of the transfer (e.g., adding a temporal gap at contact) disrupted this expectation. These results suggest that the visual system rapidly and automatically infers causal transfer of visual properties like color, extending beyond spatiotemporal properties linked to force.