Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Temporal binding (TB), the perceived compression in time between an action and its effect versus an observed action and its effect, has been viewed as an implicit measure of sense of agency (SoA). SoA refers to the feeling of control over our actions and their outcomes. Recent work has raised methodological and theoretical concerns about the TB paradigm. Most problematically, the TB effect may be explained by a regression-to-the mean pattern commonly observed as a memory bias, rather than as an effect related to SoA. We tested this possibility using two structurally equivalent tasks. Participants completed a standard TB task and a well-established memory task (line length estimation) that we equated on all aspects to allow for direct comparison. We did not replicate the TB effect; instead, both the time interval and line length conditions showed classic regression-to-the-mean memory effects, consistent with predictions from the Category Adjustment Model (Huttenlocher, 2000).