The reliability of Temporal Binding across sessions and tasks

• Grant number: 21/13386-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: February 25, 2022
• End date: July 24, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Cognitive Psychology
• Principal Investigator: André Mascioli Cravo
• Grantee: Gustavo Brito de Azevedo
• Supervisor: Marc Buehner
• Host Institution: Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição (CMCC). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Cardiff University, Wales
• Associated to the scholarship: 19/25572-3 - A comparison of temporal binding across different tasks, BP.MS

Abstract

Time perception is an essential skill for living beings. Two of the primary skills related to time perception are interval timing (the ability to measure the duration between two events) and occurrence timing (the ability to precise a time when a particular event occurred). Although these are essential abilities, we know that they are subject to bias and distortion. Haggard et al. (2002) demonstrated one of these effects, known as temporal binding, in which a cause and its effect seem approximate in time as if the interval between the two events had shortened in the subjective perception. After this seminal study, the importance of causal and temporal perception interaction has often been discussed. Several studies have already used different methodologies relating to one of those two central time perception abilities. Still, no study investigated how reliable the effect was measured using various tasks and whether there were consistent correlations across these tasks. In our project, we developed a battery of four experiments. We evaluated the same volunteers in two sessions to estimate the reliability of the effect and used it as a probe for temporal perception. We replicated temporal binding in three out of four experiments, and our results showed that consistency within the same session and for the same experiment is high. In contrast, it is low for different sessions, suggesting that temporal binding consistently fluctuates within the same participant. Therefore, to assess how this state fluctuates over time, we propose a more extensive battery of six experimental sessions that will take place at Cardiff University. (AU)