intentionbinding

Intention binding, also referred to as intentional binding, is a perceptual phenomenon in which voluntary actions and their consequences are experienced as temporally closer than they actually are. The effect reflects a sense of agency: the experience that one caused an outcome and that the action and its effect belong to a single intentional event.

In typical experiments, participants perform a voluntary action (such as pressing a button) that produces a sensory outcome after a short delay. They are asked to judge the timing of either the action or the outcome. When the action is intentional and causes the outcome, the interval between action and outcome is perceived as shorter than in non-causal or externally caused conditions. The binding effect is often described as consisting of two components: action binding (the perceived time of the action shifts toward the outcome) and outcome binding (the perceived time of the outcome shifts toward the action). The Libet clock paradigm is a common method for measuring these judgments.

The phenomenon is thought to arise from predictive motor signals and forward models that anticipate sensory consequences of one's actions, creating a match between predicted and actual feedback. Factors that enhance binding include intentionality, predictability, and the perceived authorship of the outcome; conditions that disrupt sense of agency, such as delayed or externally caused effects, typically reduce binding.

Intention binding is used to study the sense of agency in both healthy individuals and clinical populations, with findings suggesting variations linked to conditions such as schizophrenia and autism. Debates continue regarding whether binding reflects perceptual changes, cognitive judgments, or a combination, as well as how task design and attention influence the effect.