Recent evidence indicates that humans can precisely predict the outcome of occluded actions. It has been suggested that these predictions arise from a mental simulation which might run in real-time. The present experiments aimed to specify the time course of this simulation process. Participants watched transiently occluded point-light actions and the temporal outcome after occlusion was manipulated. Participants were instructed to judge the temporal coherence of the action after a short (Experiment 1) and a long occlusion period (Experiment 2). Both experiments revealed a comparable negative point of subjective equality (PSE), indicating that action simulation took constantly longer than the observed action itself. Such a temporal error was not present when inverted actions were used, (Experiment 3) ruling out a pure visually driven effect. The results suggest that the temporal error is due to costs arising from a switch from action perception to an internal simulation process involving motor representations.

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The omnipresent abstract symbol for time progression and regression is clockwise versus counterclockwise rotation. It was tested whether merely executing and seeing clockwise (vs. counterclockwise) movements would induce psychological states of temporal progression (vs. regression) and according to motivational orientations toward the future and novelty (vs. the past and familiarity). Supporting this hypothesis, participants who turned cranks counterclockwise preferred familiar over novel stimuli, but participants who turned cranks clockwise preferred novel over old stimuli, reversing the classic mere exposure effect (Experiment 1). Also, participants rotating a cylinder clockwise reported higher scores in the personality measure openness to experience than participants rotating counterclockwise (Experiment 2). Merely passively watching a rotating square had similar but weaker effects on exposure and openness (Experiment 3). Finally, participants chose more unconventional candies from a clockwise than from a counterclockwise Lazy Susan, that is, a turntable (Experiment 4).

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