Intentional binding effect depends on conscious access to the sensory consequences of action.
John P Veillette, Yimeng Cheng, Aditi Joshi, Howard C Nusbaum
Communications Psychology September 29, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00323-5 (opens in new tab) via PubMed
Summary
AI-generated from the abstractThe 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.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Experimental study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Intentional binding was reversed when participants were unaware of their actions' sensory outcomes, indicating that the effect depends on conscious awareness. |
Abstract
The nature of self-awareness has been a topic of inquiry for thousands of years, with profound implications for law and ethics, as well as for understanding a host of neurological and psychiatric pathologies. An influential view in philosophy of mind is that the "self" is a construct of consciousness, its basic functions - such as the sense of agency, the capacity by which we attribute sensory events to our own control - cease when they fall out of awareness. An alternative view is that some core processes that constitute the self can operate outside of awareness, and self-awareness arises when these extant processes become contents of consciousness. We aimed to test between these views empirically by investigating whether intentional binding - an implicit marker of sense of agency in which the perceived time of an action is shifted toward its sensory outcome - occurs even when the outcome is masked from conscious awareness. To our surprise, the intentional binding effect was not just abolished when participants were unaware of their actions' sensory outcomes but appeared to be reversed; the perceived time of the action was repelled from the time of its unconsciously perceived consequence. Results demonstrate that the intentional binding effect, and by extension ordinary processing of sensorimotor contingencies, is functionally dependent upon conscious awareness.