An ACT-R model of temporal binding

Temporal Binding (TB) is the subjective compression between a voluntary action and its associated outcome and is standardly regarded as an implicit measure of the sense of agency (Haggard, 2017) though an underlying mechanism has yet to be agreed upon (Hoerl et al., 2020). It has previously been shown that a memory process is a plausible alternative explanation for the observed effect in two publicly available datasets (Saad et al., 2022). Here, we extend this idea by implementing a cognitive model using the ACT-R cognitive architecture and show that these same publicly available data (Weller et al., 2020) can also be successfully simulated using basic mechanisms from the architecture, e.g., memory and time perception. Importantly, our model simulations provide evidence to suggest than an appeal to agency is not necessary to explain this effect. Implications of these results for temporal binding and the sense of agency will be discussed.