Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the interval estimation task, participants are asked to estimate the time interval between two events. Interval estimates tend to be smaller if the first event is a voluntary action. The cognitive mechanisms that generate this temporal binding effect remain unclear. In this study, we propose a computational model of this phenomenon. We hypothesize that participants perform this task by comparing the availability of experimental events in memory. More specifically, we claim that temporal binding effects may be attributed to differences in emotional arousal at the time of encoding due to the type of event. For instance, voluntary actions may be accompanied by slightly higher arousal, leading to stronger traces of the first event relative to the involuntary case.