Action, prediction, and temporal awareness.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• The brain must accurately track the temporal relationship between voluntary actions and their sensory consequences.
• Understanding how the brain learns and adapts to changing action-effect contingencies is crucial for explaining control perception.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how the brain learns action-effect contingencies using time perception as an implicit measure.
• To determine if temporal binding between actions and effects is influenced by predictive learning and attention.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments involving voluntary keypress actions followed by tones after a fixed interval.
• Adaptation phase with fixed intervals, followed by a test phase with unexpected interval changes.
• Time perception was used to measure the subjective experience of temporal binding and control.

Main Results:

• Participants demonstrated temporal binding, perceiving effects as closer in time to their actions after adaptation.
• Perceived timing of effects shifted towards the adapted interval, indicating reliance on internal predictions.
• This predictive learning was updated rapidly and required attention to the sensory effects.

Conclusions:

• The brain forms predictive models of action-effect relationships that influence temporal perception.
• Temporal illusions related to action control arise from the brain's predictive processing of sensory events.
• Attention plays a key role in updating these predictive models of action-effect timing.