Do Implicit and Explicit Measures of the Sense of Agency Measure the Same Thing?

John A Dewey,Günther Knoblich,Sonja Kotz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0110118

Abstract

The sense of agency (SoA) refers to perceived causality of the self, i.e. the feeling of causing something to happen. The SoA has been probed using a variety of explicit and implicit measures. Explicit measures include rating scales and questionnaires. Implicit measures, which include sensory attenuation and temporal binding, use perceptual differences between self- and externally generated stimuli as measures of the SoA. In the present study, we investigated whether the different measures tap into the same self-attribution processes by determining whether individual differences on implicit and explicit measures of SoA are correlated. Participants performed tasks in which they triggered tones via key presses (operant condition) or passively listened to tones triggered by a computer (observational condition). We replicated previously reported effects of sensory attenuation and temporal binding. Surprisingly the two implicit measures of SoA were not significantly correlated with each other, nor did they correlate with the explicit measures of SoA. Our results suggest that some explicit and implicit measures of the SoA may tap into different processes.

Highlights

The sense of agency (SoA) refers to perceived causality of the self, i.e. the feeling of causing something to happen
This indicates that performing the temporal binding task somehow contributed to subsequent sensory attenuation
In recent years an increasing number of investigators been turning to implicit measures, temporal binding, to investigate the SoA [4], [28], [51]

Summary

Introduction

The sense of agency (SoA) refers to perceived causality of the self, i.e. the feeling of causing something to happen. People control what they perceive by performing actions which have predictable effects on their environment. This allows people to distinguish the contingent sensory consequences of voluntary actions, ‘‘action-effects’’, from externally generated stimuli. Implicit measures use perceptual differences between self- and externally generated action-effects as measures of the SoA. Most of the literature suggests that there should be a close relationship between implicit and explicit measures of the SoA. It is not clear so far whether the different measures tap into the same self-attribution processes

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Conclusion