Who wrote that? Automaticity and reduced sense of agency in individuals prone to dissociative absorption

Dissociative absorption (DA) is a tendency to become completely immersed in a stimulus while neglecting to attend to one’s surroundings. Theoretically, DA implies automatic functioning in areas that are outside the focus of attention. This study examined whether high absorbers indeed act more automatically, i.e., with decreased meta-consciousness for, and therefore poor memory of, their own actions, along with reduced sense of agency (SoA). High and low absorbers (N = 63) performed three DA-promoting tasks: choice-reaction time (CRT), Tetris, and free writing. Participants were tested on memory of task details and self-reported their state SoA. As hypothesized, trait DA was correlated with impaired autobiographical memory for self-generated writing. However, DA was not related to episodic memory disruptions in externally-generated content tasks (Tetris, CRT). In most tasks, DA was associated with decreased SoA. Absorbers’ specific difficulty in identifying self-generated content suggests that their memory failures stem from reduced accessibility to self-actions and intentions.     

Microsaccade-rate indicates absorption by music listening

The power of music is a literary topos, which can be attributed to intense and personally significant experiences, one of them being the state of absorption. Such phenomenal states are difficult to grasp objectively. We investigated the state of musical absorption by using eye tracking. We utilized a load related definition of state absorption: multimodal resources are committed to create a unified representation of music. Resource allocation was measured indirectly by microsaccade rate, known to indicate cognitive processing load. We showed in Exp. 1 that microsaccade rate also indicates state absorption. Hence, there is cross-modal coupling between an auditory aesthetic experience and fixational eye movements. When removing the fixational stimulus in Exp. 2, saccades are no longer generated upon visual input and the cross-modal coupling disappeared. Results are interpreted in favor of the load hypothesis of microsaccade rate and against the assumption of general slowing by state absorption.