Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Temporal binding refers to the subjective contraction in timebetween an action and its consequence. Since it was reportedin 2002 the effect has generated much interest, although aconsensus regarding the mechanisms behind it remainselusive. While multiple theoretical accounts have beenproposed, a key point of contention remains whether theeffect is the result of the perception of intentionality orcausality. We deployed a new apparatus to compareintentional to mechanical causation. Thirty participantsreported the interval between two events in self-causal,mechanical-causal and non-causal conditions. The results of aBayesian analysis pointed to smaller temporal estimates in theself-causal condition compared with the mechanical-causalcondition, in addition to smaller estimates in the mechanical-causal condition compared with the non-causal condition. Theevidence presented here suggests that causality alone may besufficient for temporal binding to occur, but that this effect isboosted by the presence of intentional action.