Lectures and seminars Cognitive Neuroscience Club: How Self-Initiated Events Shape Temporal Perception and Preparation

Abstract

Voluntary actions alter how we perceive and prepare for events in time. This talk integrates findings from two lines of research examining the temporal consequences of self-initiated actions. First, I present evidence on temporal binding—the subjective compression of time between voluntary actions and their effects—showing task-dependent variations across multiple paradigms (temporal estimation, reproduction, and Libet clock). These binding effects show good within-session reliability but poor between-session stability, suggesting an interaction of state and trace characteristics across participants. Second, I examine how voluntary actions influence temporal preparation for upcoming visual stimuli. Across multiple experiments, we find that action-triggered stimuli yield slower reaction times than externally-triggered stimuli, particularly at shorter foreperiods under temporal uncertainty. Together, these studies reveal a nuanced picture: while voluntary actions compress our subjective experience of elapsed time between cause and effect, they simultaneously impair our ability to prepare for the consequences of those actions temporally. I discuss these findings, focusing on how the effects of action depend on specific task demands and temporal context.