What over When in causal agency: Causal experience prioritizes outcome prediction over temporal priority

•Action-outcome consistency influences causal judgment but not time perception.•Consistent outcomes are experienced more often as being generated by an action even though they actually occur before action execution.•Causal experience emerges from the weighed combination of temporal and contextual cu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Consciousness and cognition 2022-09, Vol.104, p.103378-103378, Article 103378
Main Authors: Bonnet, Emmanuelle, Masson, Guillaume S., Desantis, Andrea
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Action-outcome consistency
Action-outcome prediction
Causality
Engineering Sciences
Physics
Sense of agency
Simultaneity perception
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Summary:•Action-outcome consistency influences causal judgment but not time perception.•Consistent outcomes are experienced more often as being generated by an action even though they actually occur before action execution.•Causal experience emerges from the weighed combination of temporal and contextual cues. Prior expectations strongly structure the way we perceive the world and ourselves. For instance, action-outcome prediction can modulate time perception and causal experience. We designed a study that allowed us to investigate whether action-outcome prediction has similar effects on time perception and intentional causality. Participants viewed a stimulus that was consistent or inconsistent with the action they, or another agent executed. The stimulus preceded or followed these actions and participants reported simultaneity or causal judgments. Observers were more likely to report the consistent outcomes as being generated by the action, even when the outcomes actually preceded the action. However, outcome consistency did not modulate simultaneity judgments. These results shed insight on the relationship between time and causal experience. It suggests that time perception and causal experience do not rely in the same way on temporal information, the latter being more permeable to contextual cues such as action-outcome consistency.
ISSN:1053-8100
1090-2376
DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2022.103378