The enhancement of temporal binding effect after negative social feedback

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Neuroscience
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Sense of agency, the feeling of controlling one's actions and their consequences, is fundamental to human experience.
• Temporal binding, the perceived closeness between an action and its outcome, reflects an individual's causal beliefs.
• Social feedback can modulate subjective experiences, but its specific impact on agency and temporal binding requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how social feedback influences the temporal binding between voluntary actions and their outcomes.
• To determine if social feedback affects causal beliefs and agency judgments.
• To explore the role of action-outcome contingency and feedback presentation order in this effect.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed voluntary actions to cause outcomes, receiving social feedback (positive or negative).
• Experiments manipulated action-outcome contingency (Experiment 1b), action type (voluntary vs. involuntary, Experiment 1c), outcome visibility, and feedback timing (Experiment 2).
• Additional experiments isolated the effects of social feedback and action-outcome presentation (Experiment 3).

Main Results:

• A larger temporal binding effect was observed following negative social feedback compared to positive feedback.
• This effect was dependent on the presence of social feedback and not observed when causal beliefs were absent or actions were involuntary.
• The findings were robust regardless of action-outcome availability or the order of feedback presentation.

Conclusions:

• Social feedback, particularly negative feedback, significantly enhances the temporal binding between actions and outcomes.
• This modulation of temporal binding reflects dynamic changes in the sense of agency influenced by social evaluation.
• The study highlights the crucial role of social context in shaping our perception of control and causality.