🤝 A heartfelt thank you to my supervisors, Prof André Cravo (@andrecravo.bsky.social) and Prof Marc Buehner (profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/buehnerm), for their invaluable guidance throughout this project.

Let us know your thoughts and questions below!

🛠️ All data, scripts, and materials are available here: osf.io/tk8f6/.

🔄 Takeaway: Temporal binding is task-dependent and likely involves distinct underlying mechanisms. These findings have important implications for experimental design and interpreting how we perceive time and causality, particularly in correlational research.

⏳ The temporal binding effect appeared stronger for shorter intervals (e.g., 500–750 ms) and decreased as intervals lengthened. This finding challenges assumptions of universality across paradigms.

💡 The Estimation and Reproduction tasks showed significant correlations, hinting at shared underlying mechanisms. In contrast, minimal consistency between other tasks suggests distinct processes may contribute to the temporal binding effect.

📊 Key results:

We replicated the temporal binding effect in the Libet Clock, Estimation, and Reproduction tasks but not in Anticipation.

Some tasks showed strong within-session reliability but poor consistency across sessions. It seems that binding is very variable across different sessions! 🤔

We tackled this question by employing 4 distinct tasks across 2 experiments:

💻 The tasks:

Libet Clock
Temporal Estimation
Temporal Reproduction
Stimulus Anticipation

Participants performed these tasks over multiple sessions, both in online and controlled laboratory environments.

Temporal binding is a phenomenon where subjective time appears to "compress" between a cause and its effect, compared to unrelated events. This illusion has been demonstrated across various experimental methods - but do these methods measure the same underlying mechanism? 👇