Abstract
Agency plays an important role in self-recognition from motion. Here, we investigated whether our own movements benefit from preferential processing even when the task is unrelated to self-recognition, and does not involve agency judgments. Participants searched for a moving target defined by its known shape among moving distractors, while continuously moving the computer mouse with one hand. They thereby controlled the motion of one item, which was randomly either the target or any of the distractors, while the other items followed pre-recorded motion pathways. Performance was more accurate and less prone to degradation as set size increased when the target was the self-controlled item. An additional experiment confirmed that participant-controlled motion was not physically more salient than motion recorded offline. We found no evidence that self-controlled items captured attention. Taken together, these results suggest that visual events are perceived more accurately when they are the consequences of our actions, even when self-motion is task irrelevant.
Highlights
You are gazing into a glass window reflecting the people walking by
The results show that when the target motion happened to be controlled by the participant, performance was more accurate and did not decrease as the number of distractors in the search display increased
The findings of the present study suggest that an object that moves in spatio-temporal congruence with our own willed movement enjoys a special status in visual search even when it is task irrelevant
Summary
You are gazing into a glass window reflecting the people walking by. You are searching for a specific target (say, a friend) in the window reflection. The sense of agency relies on both efferent information, that is, centrally defined motor plans that provide information about our intended movements, and afferent information, that is, various sensory inputs (visual, tactile, and proprioceptive) monitoring the execution of these motor plans. The interplay between these sources of information allows us to continuously distinguish between the consequences of our actions and the consequences of actions that are unrelated to our own, and thereby to distinguish our own bodies and movements from those of others [1,2,3]
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