Altered pre-reflective sense of agency in autism spectrum disorders as revealed by reduced intentional binding.
Adults with autism show a fainter gut-level link between their actions and results, a gap that persists even as some sensory binding improves with age.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sperduti et al. (2014) asked adults with and without autism to press a key that made a tone happen 250 ms later. The task feels like you control the beep.
The team measured 'intentional binding' — the tiny shrinkage of felt time between your action and its effect. Less shrinkage means a weaker gut sense that 'I caused that.'
What they found
Autistic adults showed weaker binding. Their brains did not automatically stitch the key-press and tone together as tightly as neurotypical peers did.
The result signals a muted pre-reflective sense of agency: they register their own actions, but the internal 'I did it' tag is fainter.
How this fits with other research
Lafleur et al. (2025) ran the same key-tone task and added explicit questions about control. They replicated the weak binding and showed autistic adults also down-weight cues when judging agency, proving the problem lives in both gut and conscious levels.
Ainsworth et al. (2023) looked at a different kind of binding — how autistic kids pair sounds with lights. That sensory window narrows with age, moving toward typical. Marco’s adults, however, still show a gap in action–outcome binding. The two studies seem to clash, but they test different circuits: motor–agency versus audiovisual fusion. One matures; the other does not.
Williams et al. (2010) found another binding weakness: autistic viewers needed stronger visual hints to see scattered dots move as a unit. Together the papers map a broader binding 'signature' across action, motion, and sensory domains in autism.
Why it matters
If clients feel less automatic ownership of their actions, they may need extra cues to link choices with outcomes. During teaching, pair each response with an immediate, salient consequence and label it aloud: 'You pushed the button, so the song played.' Over time, explicit bridging may shore up the shaky internal tag that 'I caused that.'
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are neurodevelopmental conditions that severely affect social interaction, communication and several behavioural and cognitive functions, such as planning and monitoring motor actions. A renewed interest in intrapersonal cognition has recently emerged suggesting a putative dissociation between impaired declarative processes, such as autobiographical memory, and spared implicit processes, such as the sense of agency (SoA) in ASDs. However, so far only a few studies have investigated the integrity of SoA using tasks exclusively tapping reflective mechanisms. Since pre-reflective processes of SoA are based on the same predictive internal models that are involved in planning and monitoring actions, we hypothesized that pre-reflective aspects of SoA, as measured by the intentional binding effect, would be altered in adults with high functioning autism spectrum disorders, relative to volunteers with typical development. Here, in accordance with our hypothesis, we report reduced IB in participants with ASDs.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2014 · doi:10.1007/s10803-013-1891-y