Abstract
The sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over one’s actions, and, through them, over external events. One proposed marker of implicit sense of agency is ‘intentional binding’—the tendency to perceive voluntary actions and their outcomes as close in time. Another is attenuation of the sensory consequences of a voluntary action. Here we show that the ability to choose an outcome through action selection contributes to implicit sense of agency. We measured intentional binding and stimulus intensity ratings using painful and non-painful somatosensory outcomes. In one condition, participants chose between two actions with different probabilities of producing high or low intensity outcomes, so action choices were meaningful. In another condition, action selection was meaningless with respect to the outcome. Having control over the outcome increased binding, especially when outcomes were painful. Greater sensory attenuation also tended to be associated with stronger binding of the outcome towards the action that produced it. Previous studies have emphasised the link between sense of agency and initiation of voluntary motor actions. Our study shows that the ability to control outcomes by discriminative action selection is another key element of implicit sense of agency. It also investigates, for the first time, the relation between binding and sensory attenuation for the same events.
Highlights
The sense of agency refers to the feeling of controlling one’s own actions and, through them, events in the outside world
We asked our participants to rate outcome stimulus intensity after each trial. Since both sensory attenuation and intentional binding have been proposed as implicit measures of sense of agency, we investigated whether lower intensity ratings would be associated with greater intentional binding across trials
Perception of low heat-pain stimuli did not vary with predictability, t(24) = 0.90, p = 0.377, nor did perception of electro-cutaneous stimuli (Fig. 4b), whether high, t(24) = À0.02, p = 0.988, or low, t(24) = À2.06, p = 0.050. We found that both action and outcome binding increased when participants had probabilistic control over outcome intensity
Summary
The sense of agency refers to the feeling of controlling one’s own actions and, through them, events in the outside world It is a ubiquitous and familiar experience, but has proved difficult to study experimentally, in part because of a ‘self-serving bias’ that associates more positive outcomes to one’s own agency (Bradley, 1978; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Burling, & Tibbs, 1992). Attenuation of the sensory consequences of a voluntary action has been proposed as a measure of implicit sense of agency (Blakemore, Frith, & Wolpert, 1999). It remains unclear whether both measures reflect a single underlying cognitive construct, or distinct cognitive processes.
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