Disappearing and appearing: Temporal binding effects are consistent across situations.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Human Perception

Background:

• Sense of agency is the feeling of controlling actions and outcomes.
• Prior research primarily focused on agency when making objects appear.
• Agency during object disappearance remains largely uninvestigated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the sense of agency when performing actions that cause objects to disappear.
• To compare the implicit sense of agency for appearing versus disappearing objects.
• To extend the understanding of temporal binding to object disappearance.

Main Methods:

• Examined the temporal binding effect, an implicit measure of sense of agency.
• Compared the temporal binding effect in conditions where actions made objects appear versus disappear.
• Utilized experimental paradigms to elicit and measure action-outcome binding.

Main Results:

• The temporal binding effect was observed when object disappearances were action outcomes.
• No significant difference was found in the magnitude of temporal binding between appearing and disappearing object conditions.
• Implicit sense of agency is comparable for voluntary object appearance and disappearance.

Conclusions:

• Voluntarily making objects disappear elicits a sense of agency.
• The temporal binding effect reliably indicates agency for both object appearance and disappearance.
• Findings suggest symmetrical implicit agency mechanisms for initiating and terminating object presence.