Temporal binding: Task-dependent variations and reliability across experimental paradigms

Abstract

Temporal binding refers to the subjective shortening of time between a cause and its effect compared with two unrelated events. The effect has been extensively explored over the past two decades and manifests across a robust range of paradigms, reflecting two distinct expressions of binding: (1) the subjective shortening of elapsed time between cause and effect and (2) the subjective attraction of cause and effect to each other. However, whether and how these binding expressions are related is still largely unknown. In this study, we report two experiments, employing four tasks (stimulus anticipation, Libet clock, interval estimation, and reproduction). We computed within and between session and task correlations across two (Experiment 1) and six (Experiment 2) sessions. Across both experiments, we successfully replicated temporal binding in temporal estimation, temporal reproduction, and the Libet clock, but not in stimulus anticipation. Good within-task and within-session reliability were observed, but reliability between sessions was poor. Correlation analyses revealed associations between binding effects measured via temporal estimation and temporal reproduction, underscoring task-dependent variations, in line with the suggestion that different temporal tasks tap into distinct facets of the temporal binding effect. This nuanced understanding contributes to refining experimental paradigms and advancing the comprehension of human temporal processing. The data, materials, and experiments from the present study are publicly available.