Abstract
Previous studies have documented temporal attraction in perceived times of actions and their effects. While some authors argue that voluntary action is a necessary condition for this phenomenon, others claim that the causal relationship between action and effect is the crucial ingredient. In the present study, we investigate voluntary action and causality as the necessary and sufficient conditions for temporal binding. We used a variation of the launching effect proposed by Michotte, in which participants controlled the launch stimulus in some blocks. Volunteers reported causality ratings and estimated the interval between the two events. Our results show dissociations between causality ratings and temporal estimation. While causality ratings are not affected by voluntary action, temporal bindings were only found in the presence of both voluntary action and high causality. Our results indicate that voluntary action and causality are both necessary for the emergence of temporal binding.
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Notes
Some studies have used the mean temporal judgment instead of the median (Engbert et al. 2007, 2008). In fact, in our results, response distributions were fairly normal and analysis of mean temporal judgments revealed similar results. However, we believe that median temporal judgments are preferable as they are less susceptible to outliers. Recent studies (Humphreys and Buehner 2009) also use median temporal judgments.
The wide error bars are due to a large inter-individual variability in how the time scale is used. However, this does not affect the intra-individual consistency in how the experimental manipulations affect temporal judgments.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, grants 2005/60461-5 and 2006/50189-9. We are grateful to Carolina Feher da Silva, Hamilton Haddad Jr., Milene Regatão, Leo Arruda and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on the manuscript. We thank the volunteers that participated in the experiments.
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Cravo, A.M., Claessens, P.M.E. & Baldo, M.V.C. Voluntary action and causality in temporal binding. Exp Brain Res 199, 95–99 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1969-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1969-0