Abstract
This study explored whether sensitivity to visuomotor discrepancies, specifically the ability to detect and respond to loss of control over a moving object, is associated with other psychological traits and abilities. College-aged adults performed a computerized tracking task which involved keeping a cursor centered on a moving target using keyboard controls. On some trials, the cursor became unresponsive to participants’ keypresses. Participants were instructed to immediately press the space bar if they noticed a loss of control. Response times (RTs) were measured. Additionally, participants completed a battery of behavioral and questionnaire-based tests with hypothesized relationships to the phenomenology of control, including measures of constructs such as locus of control, impulsiveness, need for cognition (NFC), and non-clinical schizotypy. Bivariate correlations between RTs to loss of control and high order cognitive and personality traits were not significant. However, a step-wise regression showed that better performance on the pursuit rotor task predicted faster RTs to loss of control while controlling for age, signal detection, and NFC. Results are discussed in relation to multifactorial models of the sense of agency.
Highlights
Many everyday behaviors, such as driving automobiles and playing video games, involve controlling moving objects
There were three dependent measures associated with this task: (1) time on target, defined as the proportion of each trial that the user-controlled cursor at least partially overlapped with the moving target prior to the loss of control, (2) the accuracy of participants’ responses to loss of control; and (3) the Response times (RTs) to loss of control
Because the moving cursor kept its momentum without simulating friction, participants’ control could have been obscured
Summary
Many everyday behaviors, such as driving automobiles and playing video games, involve controlling moving objects. We use “predictive process” as shorthand for the brain’s ability to anticipate the perceptual consequences of voluntary actions (Wolpert et al, 1995; Prinz, 1997; Hommel et al, 2001). It is well-established that the predictability of actions and their outcomes contributes to the sense of agency, i.e., the phenomenology of willfully causing something to happen (Gallagher, 2000; Haggard, 2005; Haggard and Tsakiris, 2009). Anticipation of the visual, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic feedback produced by voluntary body movements is one mechanism by which individuals recognize those movements as self-generated (Blakemore et al, 1999; Frith, 2005; Farrer et al, 2008)
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