Temporal binding, the attraction of an action and its consequences in temporal perception, has been associated with the sense of agency.
Temporal binding often is quantified with the Libet-Clock during which participants press a button to trigger a tone while observing a clock hand rotate. Subsequently, participants report the perceived hand position during the button press or during the tone. These judgements of the so-called contingent conditions are compared to baseline conditions in which only one, the button press or the tone, occur.
The aim of this study is to investigate a possible mechanism underlying this effect. The contingent conditions present two pieces of spatial information, the clock hand positions during button press and tone. One possible mechanism could be pro- and retrospective interference between in spatial working memory between the two hand positions. From this assumption we derive the hypothesis that temporal binding increases under spatial working memory load.
75 participants completed the Libet-Clock task twice. Once, every trial is preceded by an array of nine squares of which zero to four change their color. In the other instance, zero to four Chinese characters are presented before every trial. After each trial, the presented information had to be recalled.
Bayes factors for linear model comparison revealed the temporal binding effect which, however, did not depend on the number of items to be remembered in neither of the two dual tasks. These results suggest that the temporal binding effect does not result from interference processes within the spatial working memory.