No Evidence in Favour of the Existence of ‘Intentional’ Binding

Abstract

Intentional binding refers to the subjective temporal compression between a voluntary action and its sensory outcome. Though widely used as an implicit measure for the sense of agency, recent studies challenged the link between temporal compression and intention. The debate remains unsettled though, as intention has not been tested against all potential alternatives. Here, we fill this gap by jointly comparing participants' estimates of the interval between three types of triggering events with comparable predictability -voluntary movement, passive movement, external sensory event- and an external sensory outcome (auditory or visual across experiments). Results failed to show intentional binding, i.e., no shorter interval estimation for the voluntary than the passive movement conditions. Instead, we observed substantial temporal (but not intentional) binding when comparing both movement conditions to the external sensory condition. Thus, temporal binding seems to originate from sensory integration and temporal prediction, not from action intention.

Distance modulates urgency to act and action awareness

“…The presence of an action's consequence, namely a tone, modulates the subjective temporal perception of an action, its decisions and its consequence. Such results replicated the previously reported temporal binding between the perceived time of an action and of its external consequence (Haggard et al, 2002), a well-known effect that has been attributed to multisensory integration (Kirsch & Kunde, 2023;Kirsch et al, 2019;Kong et al, 2023), predictability (Buehner, 2012;Gentsch et al, 2012;Hughes et al, 2013) and sense of agency (Caspar et al, 2015;Haggard & Chambon, 2012), although the latter remains debated (Kirsch et al, 2019;Kong et al, 2023;Buehner, 2015). In addition, we also found a temporal shift of the perceived time of decision, namely, there was also a temporal binding between decision and consequence.…”

“…Importantly, this temporal attraction phenomenon was attenuated or even reversed in cases involving involuntary movements and their associated tones. It should be noted that this phenomenon has faced recent challenges, with several studies pointing out that temporal bindings might be arising from causality, predictability and somatosensory cues rather than intentionality per se (Kirsch et al, 2019;Kong et al, 2023;Buehner & Humphreys, 2009).…”

Libet’s legacy: A primer to the neuroscience of volition

“…Intentional binding has therefore been commonly used as an implicit measure of the sense of agency (for more on the sense of agency, see Dewey & Knoblich, 2014;Haggard, 2017;Haggard & Eitam, 2015;Hughes, 2018;Moore & Obhi, 2012;Saito et al, 2015;Wen, 2019;Wolpe & Rowe, 2014). However, recent studies have criticized the extent to which intentional binding specifically reflects intentions or agency, instead relating it to a simple cause-and-effect relationship (Suzuki et al, 2019), to an action-effect relationship irrespective of whether the action was intentional or passive (Kong et al, 2023), to expectation of the feedback timing and the nature of the feedback (Antusch et al, 2021), or to attentional mechanisms (Schwarz & Weller, 2023). In addition, the validity of intentional binding as an index of sense of agency was recently called into question because the two methods that have been used to measure intentional binding (Libet's clock and direct action-effect interval estimation) do not seem to correlate (Siebertz & Jansen, 2022).…”