Experience of agency and sense of responsibility

The experience of agency refers to the feeling that we control our own actions, and through them the outside world. In many contexts, sense of agency has strong implications for moral responsibility. For example, a sense of agency may allow people to choose between right and wrong actions, either immediately, or on subsequent occasions through learning about the moral consequences of their actions. In this study we investigate the relation between the experience of operant action, and responsibility for action outcomes using the intentional binding effect (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002) as an implicit, quantitative measure related to sense of agency. We studied the time at which people perceived simple manual actions and their effects, when these actions were embedded in scenarios where their actions had unpredictable consequences that could be either moral or merely economic. We found an enhanced binding of effects back towards the actions that caused them, implying an enhanced sense of agency, in moral compared to non-moral contexts. We also found stronger binding for effects with severely negative, compared to moderately negative, values. A tight temporal association between action and effect may be a low-level phenomenal marker of the sense of responsibility.     

Intentional binding coincides with explicit sense of agency

Sense of agency, a feeling of generating actions and events by oneself, stems from action–outcome congruence. An implicit marker of sense of agency is intentional binding, which is compression of subjective temporal interval between action and outcome. We investigated relationships between intentional binding and explicit sense of agency. Participants pressed a key triggering auditory (Experiment 1) or visual outcome (Experiment 2) that occurred after variable delays. In each trial, participants rated their agency over the outcome and estimated the keypress–outcome temporal interval. Results showed that delays decreased agency ratings and intentional binding. There was inter-individual correlation between sensitivities to outcome delay (i.e., regression slope) of agency rating and intentional binding in the auditory but not visual domain. Importantly, we found intra-individual correlations between agency rating and intentional binding on a trial-by-trial basis in both outcome modalities. These results suggest that intentional binding coincides with explicit sense of agency.     

The sense of agency in human-human vs human-robot joint action

Kinesthesis pertains to the perception of moving body parts, while the sense of agency refers to the experience of controlling one’s action-effects. Based on previous work, we hypothesized that the sense of agency would decrease in joint action with a robot compared to a human partner. Pairs of participants were jointly manipulating two interconnected haptic devices enabling them to feel each other’s forces. Unbeknown to participants, their partner was sometimes replaced by a robot. The sense of agency was assessed using intentional binding, which refers to a contraction of perceived time between an action and its effect for intentional actions, and participants’ judgment of their contribution to joint action. Participants judged their contribution as higher when they were initiating action and when they were paired with the robot. By contrast, intentional binding occurred only with a human partner. This outcome supports the hypothesis that human-robot joint action hinders intentional binding.     

Sense of agency for mental actions: Insights from a belief-based action-effect paradigm

A substantial body of research has converged on the idea that the sense of agency arises from the integration of multiple sources of information. In this study, we investigated whether a measurable sense of agency can be detected for mental actions, without the contribution of motor components. We used a fake action-effect paradigm, where participants were led to think that a motor action or a particular thought could trigger a sound. Results showed that the sense of agency, when measured through explicit reports, was of comparable strength for motor and mental actions. The intentional binding effect, a phenomenon typically associated with the experience of agency, was also observed for both motor and mental actions. Taken together, our results provide novel insights into the specific role of intentional cues in instantiating a sense of agency, even in the absence of motor signals.     

Intentional action and limitation of personal autonomy. Do restrictions of action selection decrease the sense of agency?

The experience of being an intentional agent is a key component of personal autonomy. Here, we tested how undermining intentional action affects the sense of agency as indexed by intentional binding. In three experiments using the Libet clock paradigm, participants judged the onset of their action (key presses) and resulting effect (auditory stimuli) under conditions of no, partial, or full autonomy over selecting and timing their actions. In all cases, we observed a moderate to strong intentional binding effect. However, we found no evidence for an influence of personal autonomy on intentional binding. These findings thus suggest that being unable to decide how and when to perform actions does not affect the perceived temporal binding between action and effect, a phenomenon suggested to be associated with the implicit sense of agency. We discuss the implications of our findings in the context of research on personal autonomy and goal-directed behavior.     

Induced power changes the sense of agency

Power differentials are a ubiquitous feature of social interactions and power has been conceptualised as an interpersonal construct. Here we show that priming power changes the sense of agency, indexed by intentional binding. Specifically, participants wrote about episodes in which they had power over others, or in which others had power over them. After priming, participants completed an interval estimation task in which they judged the interval between a voluntary action and a visual effect. After low-power priming, participants judged intervals to be significantly longer than judgments after high-power or no priming. Thus, intentional binding was significantly changed by low-power, suggesting that power reduces the sense of agency for action outcomes. Our results demonstrate a clear intrapersonal effect of power. We suggest that intentional binding could be employed to assess agency in individuals suffering from anxiety and depression, both of which are characterised by reduced feelings of personal control.     

Cultural group perception enhances sense of agency in a multicultural society

Group, which involves collective actions for achieving shared goals, can be conceptually understood as an important source of agency and control. The current research investigated whether group identity salience can enhance sense of agency within the individual. Specifically, we examined whether an activated cultural group identity, through presenting different types of cultural photographs in a predictable way, would facilitate people's sense of agency by using an implicit method, namely, intentional binding effect paradigm. Experiment 1a found that an activated cultural group identity enhanced the sense of agency. Next, Experiment 1b replicated the findings by recruiting a different ethnic group in the same society. Experiment 2 explored what may affect the intensity of induced sense of agency and found that perceived representativeness of the presented cultural stimuli was positively correlated with the intensity of induced sense of agency. Finally, Experiment 3 explored whether ethnic minority and majority groups would demonstrate different intensity of agency when their cultural identity was activated. The results showed that the sense of agency induced by the mainstream cultural stimuli was greater than that induced by the foreign cultural photographs. These patterns were not different between the two ethnic groups. Taken together, these findings reflected the dynamic nature of cultural identity construction in a multicultural society.     

The evolving sense of agency: Context recency and quality modulate the interaction between prospective and retrospective processes

Humans acquire a sense of agency through their interactions with the world and their sensory consequences. Previous studies have highlighted stable agency-related phenomena like intentional binding, which depend on both prospective, context-dependent and retrospective, outcome-dependent processes. In the current study, we investigated the interaction between prospective and retrospective processes underlying the adaptation of an ongoing sense of agency. The results showed that prospective intentional binding developed during a temporal window of up to 20 prior events was independent of the nature of the ongoing event. By contrast, the characteristics of the ongoing event retrospectively influenced prospective intentional binding developed during a temporal window narrower than 6 prior events. These findings characterize the interaction between prospective and retrospective mechanisms as a fundamental process to continuously update the sense of agency through sensorimotor learning. High psychosis-like experience traits weakened this interaction, suggesting that reduced adaption to the context contributes to altered self-experience.     

动作的主动控制感与因果关系的主动控制感：主动动作时间压缩效应的产生机制

主动动作的时间压缩效应指主动动作到动作结果之间存在时间上的主观压缩。基于动作的主动控制感和因果关系的主动控制感是该效应的两种理论解释。本文首先分别介绍动作的主动控制感和因果关系的主动控制感, 并从行为和脑机制角度提供相应的证据解释时间压缩效应的机制。同时, 本文提出了在主动动作时间压缩效应中动作的主动控制感与因果关系的主动控制感之间可能存在的序列加工和平行加工的关系。     

Cultural background influences implicit but not explicit sense of agency for the production of musical tones

The sense of agency is suggested to occur at both low and high levels by the involvement of sensorimotor processes and the contribution of retrospective inferences based on contextual cues. In the current study, we recruited western and non-western participants and examined the effect of pleasantness of action outcomes on both feeling of control ratings and intentional binding which refers to the perceived compression of the temporal delay between actions and outcomes. We found that both western and non-western groups showed greater feeling of control ratings for the consonant (pleasant) compared to dissonant (unpleasant) outcomes. The intentional binding effect, on the other hand, was stronger for the consonant compared to dissonant outcomes in the western group only. We discuss the results in relation to how cultural background might differentially influence the effect of outcome pleasantness on low and high levels of the sense of agency.     

Environmental control and psychosis-relevant traits modulate the prospective sense of agency in non-clinical individuals

The sense of agency concerns the experience of being the source of one’s own actions and their consequences. An altered sense of agency can occur due to task automation and in psychosis. We tested in a non-clinical sample the hypothesis that reducing voluntary task control diminishes intentional binding as an implicit indicator of the sense of agency, possibly interacting with psychosis-relevant personality traits. Agent-device interactions were manipulated obtaining positive-control (voluntary interaction), no-control (automation), and negative-control (device-commanded interaction) groups. The main results showed reduced prospective intentional binding (predictive coding of action consequences) in the no-control and negative-control groups, compared to the positive-control group. Psychosis-like experiences covaried positively with intentional binding in the no-control group, but negatively in the negative-control group. Moreover, positive-social traits were associated with increased intentional binding in the positive-control group. These findings demonstrate the interplay between environmental and individual differences variables in establishing the implicit sense of agency.     

Social exclusion reduces the sense of agency: Evidence from intentional binding

Social exclusion is known to induce an immediate threat to one’s perceived sense of control. The sense of agency is an important human experience, strongly associated with volitional action. Healthy participants perceive the temporal interval between a voluntary action and its effect to be shorter than the same interval when it separates an involuntary action and effect. This temporal illusion is known as intentional binding and is used experimentally to index the implicit sense of agency. The current study investigated whether activating memories of social exclusion alters intentional binding. Results show that action-effect interval estimates are significantly longer after remembering an episode of social exclusion than after remembering an episode of social inclusion, or a no priming baseline condition. This study is the first to demonstrate the link between feelings of social exclusion and the pre-reflective sense of agency.     

Sense of agency in continuous action: Assistance-induced performance improvement is self-attributed even with knowledge of assistance

In a task involving continuous action to achieve a goal, the sense of agency increases with an improvement in task performance that is induced by unnoticed computer assistance. This study investigated how explicit instruction about the existence of computer assistance affects the increase of sense of agency that accompanies performance improvement. Participants performed a continuous action task in which they controlled the direction of motion of a dot to a goal by pressing keys. When instructions indicated the absence of assistance, the sense of agency increased with performance improvement induced by computer assistance, replicating previous findings. Interestingly, this increase of sense of agency was also observed even when instructions indicated the presence of assistance. These results suggest that even when a plausible cause of performance improvement other than one’s own action exists, the improvement can be misattributed to one’s own control of action, resulting in an increased sense of agency.     

On the influence of causal beliefs on the feeling of agency

The sense of agency is the experience of being the origin of a sensory consequence. This study investigates whether contextual beliefs modulate low-level sensorimotor processes which contribute to the emergence of the sense of agency. We looked at the influence of causal beliefs on ‘intentional binding’, a phenomenon which accompanies self-agency. Participants judged the onset-time of either an action or a sound which followed the action. They were induced to believe that the tone was either triggered by themselves or by somebody else, although, in reality, the sound was always triggered by the participants. We found that intentional binding was stronger when participants believed that they triggered the tone, compared to when they believed that another person triggered the tone. These results suggest that high-level contextual information influences sensorimotor processes responsible for generating intentional binding.     

Uncovering effects of self-control and stimulus-driven action selection on the sense of agency

The sense of agency refers to feelings of causing one’s own action and resulting effect. Previous research indicates that voluntary action selection is an important factor in shaping the sense of agency. Whereas the volitional nature of the sense of agency is well documented, the present study examined whether agency is modulated when action selection shifts from self-control to a more automatic stimulus-driven process. Seventy-two participants performed an auditory Simon task including congruent and incongruent trials to generate automatic stimulus-driven vs. more self-control driven action, respectively. Responses in the Simon task produced a tone and agency was assessed with the intentional binding task – an implicit measure of agency. Results showed a Simon effect and temporal binding effect. However, temporal binding was independent of congruency. These findings suggest that temporal binding, a window to the sense of agency, emerges for both automatic stimulus-driven actions and self-controlled actions.     

Intentional binding and the sense of agency: a review

It is nearly 10 years since Patrick Haggard and colleagues first reported the 'intentional binding' effect (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). The intentional binding effect refers to the subjective compression of the temporal interval between a voluntary action and its external sensory consequence. Since the first report, considerable interest has been generated and a fascinating array of studies has accumulated. Much of the interest in intentional binding comes from the promise to shed light on human agency. In this review we survey studies on intentional binding, focusing, in particular, on the link between intentional binding and the sense of agency (the experience of controlling action to influence events in the environment). We suggest that, whilst it is yet to be fully explicated, the link between intentional binding and the sense of agency is compelling. We conclude by considering outstanding questions and future directions for research on intentional binding.     

Studying sense of agency online: Can intentional binding be observed in uncontrolled online settings?

Intentional binding is often used as an implicit index of the sense of agency. However, intentional binding research has primarily been conducted in controlled lab environments. During the COVID-19 global pandemic, there has been a shift to implementing studies using online platforms and it is an open question whether the intentional binding effect can be found using an online experimental set-up and participant sample. Here, we address this question by asking online participants to complete the Libet clock version of the intentional binding task, which we make freely available to researchers as a jsPsych (De Leeuw, 2014) plugin. Intentional binding was observed in the form of later keypress estimates and earlier auditory tone estimates, when the auditory tone followed the keypress. These findings confirm that intentional binding can be assessed in online contexts. We discuss these findings in relation to the broader intentional binding literature.     

The impact of eye contact on the sense of agency

Recent research suggests that eye contact can lead to enhanced self-awareness. A related phenomenon, the sense of agency deals with the notion of the self as the origin of our actions. Possible links between eye contact and agency have been so far neglected. Here, we investigated whether an implicit sense of agency could be modulated by eye gaze. We asked participants to respond (button press) to a face stimulus: looking or not at the participant (experiment 1); or displaying distinct eye gaze before or after a mask (experiment 2). After each trial, participants estimated the time between their key press and the ensuing effects. We found enhanced intentional binding for conditions that involved direct compared to averted gaze. This study supports the idea that eye contact is an important cue that affects complex cognitive processes and suggests that modulating self-processing can impact the sense of agency.     

Taking credit for success: The phenomenology of control in a goal-directed task

We studied how people determine when they are in control of objects. In a computer task, participants moved a virtual boat towards a goal using a joystick to investigate how subjective control is shaped by (1) correspondence between motor actions and the visual consequences of those actions, and (2) attainment of higher-level goals. In Experiment 1, random discrepancies from joystick input (noise) decreased judgments of control (JoCs), but discrepancies that brought the boat closer to the goal and increased success (the autopilot) increased JoCs. In Experiment 2, participants raced to the goal against a computer-controlled rival boat while varying levels of noise interfered with each boat. Participants reached the goal more often and rated their own control higher when the computer rival had good control. Subjective control over moving objects depends partly on consistency between motor actions and their effects, but is also modulated by perceived success and competition.     

Power to the will: How exerting physical effort boosts the sense of agency

The sense of agency refers to the experience of being in control of one’s actions and their consequences. The 19th century French philosopher Maine de Biran proposed that the sensation of effort might provide an internal cue for distinguishing self-caused from other changes in the environment. The present study is the first to empirically test the philosophical idea that effort promotes self-agency. We used intentional binding, which refers to the subjective temporal attraction between an action and its sensory consequences, as an implicit measure of the sense of agency. Effort was manipulated independent of the primary task by requiring participants to pull stretch bands of varying resistance levels. We found that intentional binding was enhanced under conditions of increased effort. This suggests not only that the experience of effort directly contributes to the sense of agency, but also that the integration of effort as an agency cue is non-specific to the effort requirement of the action itself.