Discrepancy between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency: Implications for sense of agency and its disorders

The sense of agency refers to the feeling of authorship that “I am the one who is controlling external events through my own action”. A distinction between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency has been proposed theoretically. However, there has not been sufficient experimental evidence to support this distinction. We have assessed separate explicit and implicit agency measures in the same population and investigated their relationships. Intentional binding task was employed as an implicit measure and self-other attribution task as an explicit measure, which are known to reflect clinical symptoms of disorders in the sense of agency. The results of the implicit measure and explicit measure were not correlated, suggesting dissociation of the explicit judgement of agency and the implicit feeling of agency.     

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.     

Unravelling intention: Distal intentions increase the subjective sense of agency

Experimental studies investigating the contribution of conscious intention to the generation of a sense of agency for one’s own actions tend to rely upon a narrow definition of intention. Often it is operationalized as the conscious sensation of wanting to move right before movement. Existing results and discussion are therefore missing crucial aspects of intentions, namely intention as the conscious sensation of wanting to move in advance of the movement. In the present experiment we used an intentional binding paradigm, in which we distinguished between immediate (proximal) intention, as usually investigated, and longer standing (distal) intention. The results showed that the binding effect was significantly enhanced for distal intentions compared to proximal intentions, indicating that the former leads to stronger sense of agency. Our finding provides empirical support for a crucial distinction between at least two types of intention when addressing the efficacy of conscious intentions.     

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.     

Emotional valence,sense of agency and responsibility: A study using intentional binding

We investigated how the emotional valence of an action outcome influences the experience of control, in an intentional binding experiment. Voluntary actions were followed by emotionally positive or negative human vocalisations, or by neutral tones. We used mental chronometry to measure a retrospective component of sense of agency (SoA), triggered by the occurrence of the action outcome, and a prospective component, driven by the expectation that the outcome will occur. Positive outcomes enhanced the retrospective component of SoA, but only when both occurrence and the valence of the outcome were unexpected. When the valence of outcomes was blocked – and therefore predictable – we found a prospective component of SoA when neutral tones were expected but did not actually occur. This prospective binding was absent, and reversed, for positive and negative expected outcomes. Emotional expectation counteracts the prospective component of SoA, suggesting a distancing effect.     

The relation between the sense of agency and the experience of flow

This article investigates the relation between people’s feelings of agency and their feelings of flow. In the dominant model describing how people are able to assess their own agency—the comparator model of agency—when the person’s intentions match perfectly to what happens, the discrepancy between intention and outcome is zero, and the person is thought to interpret this lack of discrepancy as being in control. The lack of perceived push back from the external world seems remarkably similar to the state that has been described as a state of flow. However, when we used a computer game paradigm to investigate the relation between people’s feelings of agency and their feelings of flow, we found a dissociation between these two states. Although these two states may, in some ways, seem to be similar, our data indicate that they are governed by different principles and phenomenology.     

Illusion of sense of self-agency: discrepancy between the predicted and actual sensory consequences of actions modulates the sense of self-agency, but not the sense of self-ownership

It is proposed that knowledge of motor commands is used to distinguish self-generated sensation from externally generated sensation. In this paper, we show that the sense of self-agency, that is the sense that I am the one who is generating an action, largely depends on the degree of discrepancy resulting from comparison between the predicted and actual sensory feedback. In Experiment 1, the sense of self-agency was reduced when the presentation of the tone was unpredictable in terms of timing and its frequency, although in fact the tone was self-produced. In Experiment 2, the opposite case was found to occur. That is, participants experienced illusionary sense of self-agency when the externally generated sensations happened to match the prediction made by forward model. In Experiment 3, the sense of self-agency was reduced when there was a discrepancy between the predicted and actual sensory consequences, regardless of presence or absence of a discrepancy between the intended and actual consequences of actions. In all the experiments, a discrepancy between the predicted and actual feedback had no effects on sense of self-ownership, that is the sense that I am the one who is undergoing an experience. These results may suggest that both senses of self are mutually independent.     

The time windows of the sense of agency

The sense of agency depends on some internal cues that derive from action control, as well as external cues like contextual information and prior information (degree of contingency between an action and is effect). We assessed whether external agency cues are combined with internal agency cues to affect the sense of agency. In two experiments participants performed a movement (button press) that elicited, after a varying delay, an effect (ball appearing on a screen), and reported their sense of agency over the effect (full, partial or no-agency) while internal cues (premotor information) and external cues (contextual and prior information) were manipulated. We assessed the effect of agency cues on the delays at which the sense of agency varied. The delays were increased with premotor signals but were decreased with contextual information. These findings favour a model of integration of internal and external agency cues over time.     

Multiple aspects in the sense of agency

Recent significant research in a number of disciplines centers on the concept of the sense of agency. Because many of these studies cut across disciplinary lines there is good reason to seek a clear consensus on what ‘sense of agency’ means. In this paper I indicate some complexities that this consensus might have to deal with. I also highlight an important phenomenological distinction that needs to be considered in any discussion of the sense of agency, regardless of how it gets defined. Finally, I suggest that the sense of agency has an ambiguous phenomenology and I offer some critical comments on current models that fail to notice this ambiguity.     

Simulated thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using deception and magic

In order to study the feeling of control over decisions, we told 60 participants that a neuroimaging machine could read and influence their thoughts. While inside a mock brain scanner, participants chose arbitrary numbers in two similar tasks. In the Mind-Reading Task, the scanner appeared to guess the participants’ numbers; in the Mind-Influencing Task, it appeared to influence their choice of numbers. We predicted that participants would feel less voluntary control over their decisions when they believed that the scanner was influencing their choices. As predicted, participants felt less control and made slower decisions in the Mind-Influencing Task compared to the Mind-Reading Task. A second study replicated these findings. Participants’ experience of the ostensible influence varied, with some reporting an unknown source directing them towards specific numbers. This simulated thought insertion paradigm can therefore influence feelings of voluntary control and may help model symptoms of mental disorders.     

Let me take the wheel: Illusory control and sense of agency

Illusory control refers to an effect in games of chance where features associated with skilful situations increase expectancies of success. Past work has operationalized illusory control in terms of subjective ratings or behaviour, with limited consideration of the relationship between these definitions, or the broader construct of agency. This study used a novel card-guessing task in 78 participants to investigate the relationship between subjective and behavioural illusory control. We compared trials in which participants (a) had no opportunity to exercise illusory control, (b) could exercise illusory control for free, or (c) could pay to exercise illusory control. Contingency Judgment and Intentional Binding tasks assessed explicit and implicit sense of agency, respectively. On the card-guessing task, confidence was higher when participants exerted control than in the baseline condition. In a complementary model, participants were more likely to exercise control when their confidence was high, and this effect was accentuated in the pay condition relative to the free condition. Decisions to pay were positively correlated with control ratings on the Contingency Judgment task, but were not significantly related to Intentional Binding. These results establish an association between subjective and behavioural illusory control and locate the construct within the cognitive literature on agency.     

Changes in the sense of agency during hypnosis: The Hungarian version of the Sense of Agency Rating Scale (SOARS-HU) and its relationship with phenomenological aspects of consciousness

Changes in the sense of agency are defining feature of hypnosis. The Sense of Agency Rating Scale (SOARS) is a 10-item questionnaire, administered after a hypnosis session to assess alteration in the sense of agency. In the present study, a Hungarian version of the measure (SOARS-HU) is presented. The SOARS-HU and the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI) were administered to 197 subjects following hypnotizability screening with the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form A (HGSHS:A). Confirmatory factor analysis and correlations with hypnotizability demonstrate the reliability and validity of the SOARS-HU. Changes in the Involuntariness and Effortlessness subscales of the SOARS-HU were associated with alterations in subjective conscious experience, as measured by the PCI. These changes in subjective experience remained significant after controlling for HGSHS:A scores. These results indicate that changes in the sense of agency during hypnosis are associated with alterations of consciousness that are independent of hypnotizability.     

The role of agency for perceived ownership in the virtual hand illusion

The rubber hand illusion shows that people can perceive artificial effectors as part of their own body under suitable conditions, and the virtual hand illusion shows the same for virtual effectors. In this study, we compared a virtual version of the rubber-hand setup with a virtual-hand setup, and manipulated the synchrony between stimulation or movement of a virtual “effector” and stimulation or movement of people’s own hand, the similarity between virtual effector and people’s own hand, and the degree of agency (the degree to which the virtual effector could be controlled by people’s own movements). Synchrony-induced ownership illusion was strongly affected by agency but not similarity, which is inconsistent with top-down modulation approaches but consistent with bottom-up approaches to ownership. However, both agency and similarity induce a general bias towards perceiving an object as part of one’s body, suggesting that ownership judgments integrate various sources of information.