Intentional binding: Merely a procedural confound?

Sense of agency (SoA) is the feeling of having control over one's actions and their outcomes. Previous research claimed that SoA is reflected in "intentional binding" effects, that is, the subjective compression of time between a voluntary action and an intended outcome. Conventional paradigms, however, typically lack an isolated manipulation of different degrees of agency (or intentionality), as the presence or absence of actions (along with subsequent perceptual changes) represents a potential confound variable. Using a newly developed paradigm, we were able to replicate typical "intentional binding" results in an initial experiment in which such a confound was deliberately included. We then eliminated this confound in a follow-up experiment by keeping the presence of actions and perceptual changes constant between conditions with and without agency while only manipulating subjective SoA. Here, explicit ratings showed that participants indeed felt responsible for effects in the Agency condition but not in the Baseline condition (demonstrating the successful manipulation of SoA), while we no longer found any differences in "intentional binding" effects between conditions. This indicates that previously reported relations between intentional binding and SoA could be merely based on procedural confounds. In particular, temporal compression effects usually interpreted in terms of "intentional binding" may rather result from more basic temporal grouping mechanisms for any (perceptual and/or motor) events that are perceived as meaningfully belonging together (e.g., as parts of a trial episode). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).