Temporal binding: digging into animal minds through time perception

Abstract

Temporal binding is the phenomenon in which events related as cause and effect are perceived by humans to be closer in time than they actually are (Haggard et al. in Nat Neurosci 5(4):382–385, 2002, https://doi.org/10.1038/nn827). Despite the fact that temporal binding experiments with humans have relied on verbal instructions, we argue that they are adaptable to nonhuman animals, and that a finding of temporal binding from such experiments would provide evidence of causal reasoning that cannot be reduced to associative learning. Our argument depends on describing and theoretically motivating an intermediate level of representations between the lower levels of associations of sensory features and higher symbolic representations. This intermediate level of representations makes it possible to challenge arguments given by some comparative psychologists that animals lack higher-level abstract and explicit forms of causal reasoning because their cognitive capacities are limited to learning and reasoning at the basic level of perceptual associations. Our multi-level account connects time perception with causal reasoning and provides a philosophically defensible framework for experimental investigations that have not yet been pursued. We describe the structure of some possible experiments and consider the implications that would follow from a positive finding of temporal binding in nonhuman animals. Such a finding would provide evidence of explicit awareness of causal relationships and would warrant attribution of intermediate representations that are more abstract and sophisticated than the associations allowed by the lower level of the two-level account.

Distracted to a fault: Attention, actions, and time perception

“…Acting changes our time perception. When we perform a simple action (e.g., pressing a key) to elicit a subsequent effect (e.g., a tone) after a short delay, performing this action-effect sequence seems to lead to an underestimation of the time interval in between action and effect (Haggard et al, 2002;Muth et al, 2022;Ruess et al, 2017Ruess et al, , 2018Schwarz, Weller, Pfister, & Kunde, 2019b;Tanaka et al, 2019;Tramacere & Allen, 2022). We thus likely perceive action and effect as temporally closer together than they actually are, and we estimate actions and effects differently in time as part of an actioneffect sequence than when we encounter them individually (i.e., pressing only a key without consequence or hearing a tone without producing it ourselves).…”