ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Intentional Binding Reflects Pair Dynamics and Sense of Agency in Embodied Joint Action in Human-Human Dyads But Not in Human-Computer Dyads
Center for Human Naure, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN), Hokkaido Daigaku, Sapporo, Japan
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Abstract
ABSTRACT 1 Intentional binding has been proposed as 2 an implicit measure of shared sense of 3 agency in joint actions. We investigated 4 whether this measure distinguishes between 5 individual actions, human-computer joint 6 control, and human-human joint control in 7 a physically coupled button-pressing task 8 using haptic feedback devices. Contrary to 9 predictions from the we-agency literature, 10 we found no intra-subjective main effect of 11 partner type on binding magnitude. However, 12 inter-subjective comparison showed that 13 within human-human dyads, participants who 14 reported stronger sense of agency also 15 showed stronger binding effects, and this 16 corresponded to emergent leader-follower 17 dynamics in their movement trajectories. 18 No such relationship emerged in simple 19 human-computer interactions. These results 20 suggest that intentional binding primarily 21 reflects sensorimotor predictability rather than 22 intentionality or social context. We conclude 23 that intentional binding alone cannot serve 24 as a sufficient marker of "human-like" agency 25 in artificial systems, though it may index 26 how predictive control is distributed within a 27 dyad. Thus it may be useful as a quantifiable 28 signature of how effectively partners co-29 regulate each other's actions.
Summary
Keywords
Embodied Cognition, human-robot interaction, Intentional Binding, Joint Action, sense of agency, we-agency
Received
16 December 2025
Accepted
19 February 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Woolford and Suzuki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Felix Woolford
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