Seeing, hearing, and feeling causation

How do people decide whether one event caused another? While previous research has focused on visual and auditory cues in causal perception, the role of touch remains underexplored. Here, we investigate how haptic feedback contributes to causal judgments across three psychophysical experiments. In Experiment 1, we introduced force-based haptic feedback to a visual launching paradigm and found that haptic information increased causal judgments compared to visual feedback alone. Experiment 2 combined vision, audio, force-based haptics, and vibrotactile haptics, revealing that additional sensory cues increase causal judgments with diminishing returns - the largest benefit comes from adding a second modality. In Experiment 3, we examined how both the number and physical realism of multisensory cues affect causal perception, finding that both factors boosted causal judgments. We present a Bayesian multimodal inference model that captures human judgments by integrating visual, auditory, and haptic information based on their relative timing, uncertainty, and realism. Taken together, these experiments show that haptic information contributes to causal judgments by shaping the multisensory evidence observers use when deciding whether one event physically caused another, including how realistic and physically coherent the event appears. More broadly, we find that temporal alignment and cross-modal coherence are key constraints for how multisensory evidence shapes causal judgments, with implications for virtual reality, robotics, and human-computer interaction systems.