Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The perception of time is distorted by many factors, but is it possible that causality would affect our perception of time? We investigate timing changes in the temporal binding effect, which refers to a subjective shortening of the interval between actions and their outcomes. Two experiments investigated whether binding may be due to variations in the rate of an internal clock. Specifically, we asked whether clock processes in binding reflect a general timing system, or a dedicated clock unique to causal sequences. We developed a novel experimental paradigm in which participants made temporal judgments of either causal and non causal intervals, or the duration of an event embedded within that interval. While we replicated the temporal binding effect, we found no evidence for commensurate changes to time perception of the embedded event, suggesting that temporal binding is effected by changes in a specific and dedicated, rather than a general clock system.