Awareness of voluntary and involuntary causal actions and their outcomes

This article revisits Haggard, Clark, and Kalogeras’s (2002) seminal discovery of temporal binding between intentional actions and their consequences, and repulsion between involuntary actions and subsequent events. Careful analysis of the original experimental set-up reveals a confound between agency and causality, questioning the validity of temporal binding as a measure of agency, particularly in light of recent research findings that temporal binding is rooted in causality rather than intentionality (Buehner & Humphreys, 2009; Buehner, 2012). An experiment that contrasts voluntary against involuntary actions, while preserving the causal nature of these actions, replicates the original temporal binding effect for voluntary causal actions and also finds a weak binding effect for involuntary causal actions, rather than repulsion as originally reported by Haggard et al. It appears that temporal repulsion between involuntary actions and subsequent events is ameliorated in the presence of a causal relationship and that experiencing unagentic movements dampens causal binding