Intentional binding reflects pair dynamics and sense of agency in embodied joint action in human-human dyads but not in human-computer dyads.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2026 Felix Woolford, Keisuke Suzuki
Intentional binding, a measure of how people perceive time between their actions and outcomes, was tested in individual, human-computer, and human-human joint button-pressing tasks using haptic devices. Contrary to expectations from we-agency theory, the overall strength of binding did not differ between partner types. However, within human pairs, participants who reported a stronger sense of agency showed stronger binding, linked to leader-follower movement dynamics. No such link appeared in human-computer interactions. The findings indicate that temporal binding primarily reflects sensorimotor predictability rather than social context or intentionality, and may serve as a signature of how partners co-regulate their actions.