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Intentional binding refers to the subjective temporal compression between a voluntary action and its sensory outcome. Though widely used as an implicit measure for the sense of agency, recent studies challenged the link between temporal compression and intention. The debate remains unsettled though, as intention has not been tested against all potential alternatives. Here, we fill this gap by jointly comparing participants’ estimates of the interval between three types of triggering events with comparable predictability -voluntary movement, passive movement, external sensory event- and an external sensory outcome (auditory or visual across experiments). Results failed to show intentional binding, i.e., no shorter interval estimation for the voluntary than the passive movement conditions. Instead, we observed substantial temporal (but not intentional) binding when comparing both movement conditions to the external sensory condition. Thus, temporal binding seems to originate from sensory integration and temporal prediction, not from action intention.Statement of significanceIntentional binding refers to the subjective temporal compression between a voluntary action and its sensory outcome. It is nowadays widely used as an implicit measure for the sense of agency, which is the subjective feeling that we are at the origin of our own voluntary actions and of their consequences. In the present study, we demonstrate that the so-called “intentional binding” is actually not related to intention. Participants estimated the time between two causally-related events as being shorter when the first event was their movement than when it was an external sensory event. However, whether the movement was voluntary or participants’ finger was moved by an experimenter did not matter, as long as we controlled for the predictability of the movement. Thus, temporal binding seems to originate from sensory integration and temporal prediction, not from action intention, and its use as proxy for the sense of agency should be reconsidered. |
