Summary: Researchers investigate why our sense of time changes when we enjoy ourselves or feel in control of events.
Source: The Conversation.
We have all experienced it: tedious meetings and long waits feel interminable, while enjoyable moments seem to vanish in an instant. While stimulation and attention clearly affect our judgments of duration, another important factor also alters time perception — whether we understand an event’s cause or we are the cause. When we produce an outcome or believe we caused it, the interval between action and effect often feels shorter. This effect, known as temporal binding, reveals much about how our brains link cause and effect and how we experience responsibility for our actions.
What is temporal binding?
Temporal binding describes the subjective compression of time between a cause and its consequence. Observers tend to perceive the initiating event as occurring slightly later and the outcome as occurring slightly earlier, so the two events appear drawn toward each other in time. This is not a quirk of clocks but a consistent shift in perceptual experience that reveals how our minds organize related events.
Early experiments and intentional binding
Patrick Haggard and colleagues at University College London were among the first to document this phenomenon. In their experiments, participants pressed a button that triggered a tone after a brief delay. When participants intentionally initiated the action, they reported the press and the tone as occurring closer together than when they did not perform the action themselves. Crucially, the same compression did not appear when the tone followed an involuntary twitch or when tones occurred in sequence without a human action. Because this compression seemed tied to voluntary action, researchers called it “intentional binding.”
Intentional binding rapidly attracted interest as an implicit measure of perceived control. Rather than simply asking people how responsible they felt, researchers used binding to infer the subjective sense of agency — the feeling of causing events — in different conditions.
Coercion, responsibility and real-world relevance
Researchers have applied temporal binding to morally and legally relevant situations. For example, variations of the Milgram obedience paradigm have tested whether people who are coerced feel the same temporal binding as those who act by choice. In these studies, participants who were ordered to press a button that delivered a shock experienced a longer perceived interval between their action and the outcome than participants who acted willingly. From this, researchers inferred that coercion reduces the subjective sense of control and responsibility, an insight that bears on debates about obedience and accountability in high-stakes contexts.
Clinical findings: schizophrenia and altered binding
Temporal binding has also provided insight into clinical conditions. Several studies report that people with schizophrenia exhibit greater temporal binding than healthy controls. This exaggerated compression suggests an enhanced subjective coupling between actions and outcomes, which may contribute to certain symptoms in which individuals mistakenly infer personal control over events they did not cause. While this finding does not explain all aspects of such conditions, it points to altered processing of causation and agency as one relevant factor.
Is binding about control or causation?
Although temporal binding was initially linked tightly to feelings of intentional control, subsequent work has shown that causality itself — not only intention — plays a central role. Research by Marc Buehner at Cardiff University demonstrated that binding can occur even when no human agent is involved, as long as one event clearly causes another. For example, a mechanical lever that presses a switch and then produces a sound can produce temporal binding in observers. In other words, our beliefs about causal relationships help shape how we experience the timing of events.
Human actions still tend to produce stronger binding, but this may reflect that actions and consequences are simply a particularly salient form of cause-and-effect, not that agency alone creates binding.
Learning, development and future directions
One compelling idea is that temporal binding helps the brain learn about the world by grouping related events into meaningful units. Compressing the perceived time between cause and consequence may make it easier to detect regularities and form accurate causal models. To explore this, researchers at Queen’s University Belfast and Cardiff University are investigating how children experience binding. If binding supports learning, children — who are actively building causal knowledge — might show stronger binding than adults. Alternatively, children might show weaker binding if they are less able to select and integrate informational cues. It is also possible that binding remains relatively stable across the lifespan as an innate organizing principle of perception. Whatever the outcome, developmental studies of binding could illuminate how humans acquire an understanding of causality and the sense of agency.
Funding: Sara Lorimer receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.
Source: Sara Lorimer — The Conversation
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
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MLA: The Conversation. “Even Noticed Time Seems to Move Faster When You’re in Control of Things?.” NeuroscienceNews. 15 June 2018.
APA: The Conversation (2018, June 15). Even Noticed Time Seems to Move Faster When You’re in Control of Things?. NeuroscienceNews.
Chicago: The Conversation. “Even Noticed Time Seems to Move Faster When You’re in Control of Things?.” NeuroscienceNews. (accessed June 15, 2018).