What This Study Is About

When a tone follows a keypress, people tend to judge the press, and even the urge to press, as closer to the tone than when no tone follows. This shift, called intentional binding, is an indirect measure of the sense of agency: the feeling of causing your own actions. The study asks whether these two timings are linked, and whether this varies from aphantasia (little or no voluntary mental imagery) to hyperphantasia.

How They Studied It

578 volunteers took part online: 312 recruited through an aphantasia community website and 266 through the Prolific platform.

Groups came from the VVIQ (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire), a 16-item self-report questionnaire scored from 16 to 80. Core aphantasia was 16 to 23, hypophantasia (faint imagery) 24 to 32, typical imagers 33 to 74, and hyperphantasia (unusually vivid imagery) 75 to 80.

People watched a clock hand sweep, pressed a key when they chose, and then reported the hand's position at the press or at the urge. Sometimes a tone followed 250 ms later.

After quality checks, 496 remained: 230 with core aphantasia, 35 with hypophantasia, 186 typical imagers and 45 with hyperphantasia.

What They Found

Overall, reported action times shifted 16.89 ms toward the tone, and urge times 11.30 ms.

The central result was a trade-off among typical imagers. Those whose action was pulled more toward the tone tended to show less pull on their urge, a correlation of −0.27 (0 means no link). People with core aphantasia showed no clear link (−0.05), and the two groups' correlations differed significantly. Yet neither kind of binding clearly differed in strength between them.

The authors expected this trade-off across the population, but it was significant only in typical imagers. The hypophantasia and hyperphantasia groups (both −0.22) were not significant.

Hypophantasia was the only group in which binding of the urge exceeded binding of the action.

What This Might Mean

The authors suggest voluntary imagery is tied to coordinating the steps from intention to action to outcome, not to the strength of any one step. They also suggest core aphantasia and hypophantasia may be distinct. They connect this to their own theory about interoception (the sense of the body's inner state), which this study did not measure.

The study shows a link, not a cause.

Results are group averages, and individuals varied widely.

The hypophantasia and hyperphantasia groups were small.

Testing was online, with volunteers and self-reported visual imagery only.

The core aphantasia difference rests on a single comparison.

Whether binding measures agency specifically is debated.

One Interesting Detail

As a group, people with core aphantasia did not show weaker binding. In the paper's chart, their average action binding was 20.6 ms, the highest of any group, against 12.8 ms for typical imagers, though the groups did not clearly differ.

Research Consciousness and Cognition

Coupling of action–intention binding is reduced in aphantasia

Gao and colleaguesOctober 2026

Read the paper

Abstract
What This Study Is About
How They Studied It
What They Found
What This Might Mean
One Interesting Detail
Authors
Cite this paper

Abstract

The sense of agency (the feeling of being the cause of one's own actions) is thought to arise from reliability-weighted integration of multiple cues across the intention-action-outcome sequence. Whether integration is coordinated across the stages of this sequence or carried out independently at each stage remains unknown. Using the Libet clock intentional binding task in 578 participants spanning the aphantasia-to-hyperphantasia spectrum, we examined the correlation between action binding and intention binding as an index of this coordination. At the group level, negative coupling between individuals' action and intention binding was present in typical imagers (r = -0.27, p < .001), but was not present in core aphantasia, where voluntary visual imagery is entirely absent (r = -0.05, p = .44). Coupling differed significantly between these two groups, even though neither binding component differed between them. Individuals with weak but present imagery (hypophantasia) showed a distinct binding profile, with intention binding exceeding action binding magnitude, a pattern absent in all other groups. Together these findings suggest that it is the coordination of integration across the action sequence, rather than the strength of individual binding components, that distinguishes those with and without voluntary imagery.

Our summary in plain words

What This Study Is About

How They Studied It

578 volunteers took part online: 312 recruited through an aphantasia community website and 266 through the Prolific platform.

Groups came from the VVIQ (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire), a 16-item self-report questionnaire scored from 16 to 80. Core aphantasia was 16 to 23, hypophantasia (faint imagery) 24 to 32, typical imagers 33 to 74, and hyperphantasia (unusually vivid imagery) 75 to 80.

People watched a clock hand sweep, pressed a key when they chose, and then reported the hand's position at the press or at the urge. Sometimes a tone followed 250 ms later.

After quality checks, 496 remained: 230 with core aphantasia, 35 with hypophantasia, 186 typical imagers and 45 with hyperphantasia.

What They Found

Overall, reported action times shifted 16.89 ms toward the tone, and urge times 11.30 ms.

The authors expected this trade-off across the population, but it was significant only in typical imagers. The hypophantasia and hyperphantasia groups (both −0.22) were not significant.

Hypophantasia was the only group in which binding of the urge exceeded binding of the action.

What This Might Mean

The study shows a link, not a cause.

Results are group averages, and individuals varied widely.

The hypophantasia and hyperphantasia groups were small.

Testing was online, with volunteers and self-reported visual imagery only.

The core aphantasia difference rests on a single comparison.

Whether binding measures agency specifically is debated.

One Interesting Detail

This summary was written with AI and may contain errors. Check the original paper.

Authors

Cite this paper

Gao, W., Kvamme, T., Nagai, Y., & Silvanto, J. (2026). Coupling of action–intention binding is reduced in aphantasia. Consciousness and Cognition, 145, 104142. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2026.104142

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