Rethinking intentional binding

The sense of agency (SoA), defined as the feeling of control over our actions and their outcomes, is a fundamental aspect of human experience (Haggard, 2017). Intentional Binding (IB), the subjective compression of the perceived time interval between an action and its outcome, is widely regarded as an implicit measure of SoA (Haggard, 2017; Moore & Fletcher, 2012; Moore & Haggard, 2010). Notwithstanding the fact that SoA is a property of individuals, the IB effect is only documented at the aggregate level in the literature. Here, we present the first systematic study of IB at the individual level of analysis and document a pattern of anomalies in the directionality of the effect. In an experimental study in which we replicate IB at the aggregate level, we show that when the data are de-aggregated, 43% of the participants in our voluntary conditions behave in the opposite direction of what is theoretically predicted. That is, instead of showing subjective compression of the time interval between actions and outcomes, participants show time repulsion between these two classes of events, what one would expect if the actions were involuntary. Based on a reanalysis of nine datasets, we show that the anomaly we report is not an idiosyncratic feature of our study, but rather, that it is an invariant property of the IB effect, detectable across action types, laboratories, and experimental methodologies. These findings call into question the interpretation of IB as a measure of agentic processes and have important theoretical and practical implications.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference