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Time perception and the experience of agency

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Abstract

In the current study, we investigate whether sense of agency over an effect coincides with the perceived time of the effect that occurs either at its usual time or earlier or later than usual. One group of participants usually perceived an action effect immediately after the action, another group delayed by 250 ms. In test blocks the effect stimulus was sometimes presented earlier or later than usual. Participants judged either the degree of experienced agency over the effect or whether the effect had appeared at its usual time, or earlier or later than usual. In both groups experienced agency and the perception of the effect’s time ‘as usual’ were highly correlated. To rule out that time judgments influenced sense of agency, we replicated the pattern of agency judgments in Experiment 2 in which participants only judged agency. Taken together, we demonstrated that agency and time judgments vary similarly across temporal deviations of effects irrespective of to which delay participants were adapted to. The high correlation of judgment types indicates that perceiving an effect at its usual time and sensing to have caused the effect are closely related. In contrast, physical temporal proximity of actions and effects has only a minor impact on experienced agency.

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Notes

  1. We had not expected positive temporal deviations to occur when a negative deviation was planned. However, this happened and therefore increased the planned trial numbers for 0 and 50 ms deviations in the test blocks. Here we initially planned 100 time judgment and 40 agency judgment trials for 0 ms deviation and 25 time judgment and 10 agency judgment trials for 50 ms deviation.

  2. Please note that the functions for “earlier” and “later” judgments are complementary to the function of “same time as usual”-judgments, because the 50 % values of these functions as well as the slope reflect the same information. That is, participants judged great negative deviations predominantly as “earlier”, great positive deviations as “later” and those in between as “as usual”. Yet, fitting psychometric functions to “earlier” and “later” judgments required less arbitrary decisions (see Fig. 3) because some participants did not produce a unique maximum for earlier or later judgments, but for example judged 100 % of the effect stimuli at the deviations −150 and −50 ms as “earlier”, but judged only 95 % of effects at −100 ms as “earlier”.

  3. Please note that we did not include a second control experiment to assess whether time judgments in Experiment 1 were biased because participants judged agency in the same experiment. We assume that time perception is much more direct than sense of agency because time judgments refer to physically existing time intervals. Thus, we do not expect that time judgments might become biased by simultaneous requests to judge agency.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant of the German Research Foundation (DFG) to Andrea Kiesel (DFG, Grant Ki 1388/3-1).

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Wuerzburg, Roentgenring 11, 97070, Würzburg, Germany

    Carola Haering & Andrea Kiesel

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  1. Carola Haering
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  2. Andrea Kiesel
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Correspondence to Andrea Kiesel.

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Haering, C., Kiesel, A. Time perception and the experience of agency. Psychological Research 80, 286–297 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0654-0

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