Intentional binding effect depends on conscious access to the sensory consequences of action

The nature of self-awareness has been a topic of inquiry for thousands of years, with profound implications for law and ethics, as well as for understanding a host of neurological and psychiatric pathologies. An influential view in philosophy of mind is that the "self" is a construct of consciousness, its basic functions - such as the sense of agency, the capacity by which we attribute sensory events to our own control - cease when they fall out of awareness. An alternative view is that some core processes that constitute the self can operate outside of awareness, and self-awareness arises when these extant processes become contents of consciousness. We aimed to test between these views empirically by investigating whether intentional binding - an implicit marker of sense of agency in which the perceived time of an action is shifted toward its sensory outcome - occurs even when the outcome is masked from conscious awareness. To our surprise, the intentional binding effect was not just abolished when participants were unaware of their actions' sensory outcomes but appeared to be reversed; the perceived time of the action was repelled from the time of its unconsciously perceived consequence. Results demonstrate that the intentional binding effect, and by extension ordinary processing of sensorimotor contingencies, is functionally dependent upon conscious awareness.