Experiment · Temporal recalibration

Time Perception Illusion

Adapt to a delay between your action and its effect, and — once the delay is gone — some effects start to feel like they happened before you acted. A replication of Haggard's and Eagleman's work on the felt timing of action and sensation.

Warm up · feel a gap
ms

Which came first?

What's going on

Perceived duration isn't a clock reading — it's a reconstruction. After you adapt to a steady gap between an action and its effect, your brain shifts its expectation of when the effect should arrive. Remove the gap and the recalibration lingers, so a simultaneous effect can feel like it came first — an illusory reversal of action and sensation.

Why it's here

I'm replicating a published experiment. It runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere — and you can export your run as a CSV. The three phases (baseline → adaptation → test) and the reporting follow the original method.

References

  1. Haggard, P., Clark, S., & Kalogeras, J. (2002). Voluntary action and conscious awareness. Nature Neuroscience, 5(4), 382–385.
  2. Eagleman, D. M., & Holcombe, A. O. (2002). Causality and the perception of time. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(8), 323–325.
  3. Fereday, R., Buehner, M. J., & Rushton, S. K. (2019). The role of time perception in temporal binding: Impaired temporal resolution in causal sequences. Cognition, 193, 104005. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2019.06.017

Demonstration-grade: browser timing is imprecise at the millisecond scale, so read the numbers as a feel for the effect, not a measurement.
Self-contained · no accounts, no tracking, no network. Results in memory; Export CSV to keep them.