David Schwitzgebel¹, Brent Strickland¹, Alon Hafri²; ¹École Normale Supérieure—Paris Sciences et Lettres, ²University of Delaware

Causal perception typically concerns motion: when one object strikes another, momentum appears to be “transferred” from Agent to Patient. Yet many causal interactions involve non-spatiotemporal properties: a wet towel moistens skin, an ice cube cools a drink, and a paintbrush imparts its color to a surface. Does visual perception have automatic “expectations” of property transfer from Agents to Patients (but not the reverse), and are such representations constrained by intuitive physics? Across six experiments (n=869), we identify a novel class of physical events—causal property transfer—in which an Agent’s contact with a Patient produces a change in the Patient’s non-spatiotemporal properties (color, shape). In a rapid go/no-go task, participants viewed displays in which an Agent object launched a Patient object; unlike standard Michottean launching displays, one object changed color upon contact. Participants’ task was to detect whether that color matched a prespecified target color. They responded faster and more accurately on trials in which the Patient took on the Agent’s color relative to trials with incongruent color changes and trials in which the Agent took on the Patient’s color, revealing an automatic, selective visual expectation that Agents transfer their properties to Patients. This effect was disrupted when physical plausibility was eliminated (e.g., delaying the post-contact color change), suggesting sensitivity to intuitive physical constraints. Notably, it persisted when the Patient remained static, indicating reliance on a mechanism distinct from classic Michottean launching. Additional experiments showed similar effects for shape change, but again only when the transformation was physically plausible, suggesting that visual expectations about causal property transfer generalize beyond color to object properties more broadly. Taken together, these findings expand the domain of causal perception from motion to non-spatiotemporal properties and show that this novel form of causality, like classic motion-based causality, is constrained by intuitive physics.