No Evidence in Favour of the Existence of ‘Intentional’ Binding
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Intentional binding refers to the subjective temporal compression between a voluntary action and its sensory outcome. Despite some studies having challenged the link between temporal compression and intentional action, the intentional binding is still widely used as an implicit measure for the sense of agency. The debate remains unsettled primarily because the experimental conditions used in previous studies were confounded with various alternative causes for temporal compression, and action intention has not yet been tested comprehensively against all potential alternative causes in a single study. Here, we solve this puzzle 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 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. As such, these findings underscore the need to reconsider the use of "intentional binding" as a reliable proxy of the sense of agency. Public Significance Statement When we press a light switch and observe a bulb lightening, we experience a sense of agency, a feeling of control over these events. We also estimate the temporal interval between our voluntary action and its consequence shorter than the same interval between two events in which we are not involved. Such temporal binding has thus been taken as a measure of the sense of agency. However, our study reveals that voluntary actions are neither necessary, nor sufficient for temporal binding. Instead, temporal binding relies on predicting and integrating information. The sense of agency can be disturbed in various psychiatric disorders and its brain mechanisms are currently actively explored. Our study urges amending how it is measured.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it