Temporal Binding (TB) refers to the mutual attraction in subjective time between a cause and its effect: Relative to single-event baseline judgments, people’s perception of causal actions and their outcomes systematically shifts in subjective awareness. Specifically, causal actions are perceived relatively later, while their outcomes are perceived relatively earlier – action and outcome attract each other in subjective experience (cf. Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). Because the majority of demonstrations of TB deployed intentional action as the critical cause, TB is now increasingly deployed as a convenient proxy measure for Sense of Agency (SoA). Moreover, reduced TB for negative outcomes has been interpreted to reflect reduced SoA for actions that bring about negative consequences: For example, reduced TB for penalties delivered to a peer when following an experimenter’s instruction (as opposed to under free will) is taken to show that coercion reduces one’s SoA for self-action along the lines of the Nuremberg defense (Caspar, Christensen, Cleeremans, & Haggard, 2016). In this talk I will caution against overinterpreting binding as tracking SoA with three arguments: a) Agency is confounded with causality and there is now ample evidence to show that TB is in fact driven by causality – Intentional action is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce TB; b) preparations such as Caspar et al. actually deployed causal structures where the coerced action would be expected to be temporally bound to the preceding command, thus reducing TB in any case; c) attempts to replicate reductions in TB for negative outcomes have failed. Binding is still an interesting phenomenon, however, and might be useful in offering deeper insights into temporal processing more generally.

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By: Joshua Hargreaves
Last updated: Saturday, 27 April 2019