Intentional binding as an implicit measure of the sense of agency

Abstract

Intentional binding (IB) is the effect of the subjective temporal attraction of an action and its result. This effect is often viewed as an implicit measure of the sense of agency — a person's awareness of his or her own actions. In our review, we conduct an analysis of various studies reporting the correlation between IB and the sense of agency. We take into account a number of relevant differences between experimental methods, e.g., various techniques for measuring IB. Our review also considers the emergence of IB in the performance of joint actions, as well as the influence of factors such as the delay between the action and the signal, the modality of the signal, the valence of the result of the action, and so on. We conclude that IB manifests itself differently depending on the way it is measured, i.e. the uniform nature of the effect is dubious. IB is influenced by both low-level and high-level processes, which interact with each other and modulate the strength of the effect to varying degrees. As a result, the effect reflects not only the presence of the sense of agency but also the predictability of events in the experiment, as well as the presence of a representation of an action. At the same time, one of the sources of ambiguity in the existing studies is the use of different concepts of the sense of agency by different authors, which is reflected in the interpretations of the results. At the end of the review, we formulate recommendations for future experiments which are meant to take into account the methodological shortcomings of the existing studies. We also point out the most promising directions in the research of IB and present some conceptual difficulties in interpreting the experimental results.