Intentional binding effect depends on conscious access to the sensory consequences of action.
Communications Psychology September 29, 2025 John P Veillette, Yimeng Cheng, Aditi Joshi et al.
The sense of agency—the feeling that we control our own actions—may require conscious awareness of the outcomes of those actions. In an experiment testing whether intentional binding (a measure of agency in which an action's perceived time shifts toward its sensory outcome) occurs when the outcome is masked from awareness, the effect was not only absent but reversed: participants perceived their action as farther from the unconsciously perceived consequence. This suggests that ordinary sensorimotor processing depends on conscious awareness.