Abstract
The causal relationship between a voluntary movement and a sensory event is crucial for experiencing agency. Sensory events must occur within a certain delay from a voluntary movement to be perceived as self-generated. Therefore, temporal sensitivity, i.e., the ability to discriminate temporal asynchronies between motor and sensory events, is important for sensorimotor binding. Moreover, differences in the physical propagation of external stimuli can sometimes challenge sensorimotor binding, generating illusory asynchrony. To overcome this problem, the brain adjusts the perceptual timing of sensory and motor events. This mechanism, named sensorimotor recalibration, helps keeping causality judgments accurate. As humans age, the broad decline in sensory and motor processing may reduce temporal sensitivity, and compromise sensorimotor recalibration. In the current study, we investigated the effect of aging on sensorimotor temporal binding by measuring changes in both temporal sensitivity and recalibration. Young and elderly adults were exposed to a prolonged physical delay between a voluntary movement (a keypress) and its perceptual consequence (a visual stimulus). Before and after this exposure, participants performed a sensorimotor temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. As expected, elderly adults showed reduced sensorimotor recalibration and sensitivity as compared to young adults, suggesting that aging affects sensorimotor temporal binding.
Highlights
Agency is central to human life as it embraces the conscious experience of changing the external world through behavior
We investigated sensorimotor temporal binding in young and elderly individuals by measuring: (1) sensorimotor temporal sensitivity, as the ability to discriminate the temporal relationship between motor and sensory events; (2) sensorimotor recalibration, as the ability to adjust the timing of motor and sensory events after adaptation to a sensorimotor asynchrony
A repeated measure Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) confirmed an effect of group (F(1,19) = 7.66, p = 0.01, partial η2 = 0.28) but no effect of experimental condition, as just noticeable difference (JND) were similar between baseline and adaptation condition
Summary
Agency is central to human life as it embraces the conscious experience of changing the external world through behavior. Such mental phenomenon is inherently associated with causality judgments and sensorimotor temporal binding (David et al, 2008). Whether it is determining if a twig snapping is caused by one’s own footstep or by the movement of a predator, or learning to play a video game, the temporal binding of actions and sensory events is an integral part in defining the sense of agency (Haggard and Chambon, 2012). On the other side, unrelated information that violate the notion of causality are segregated (Blakemore et al, 1999; Moore et al, 2009; Moore and Fletcher, 2012)
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