The developing sense of agency: Implications from cognitive phenomenology

Abstract

How do children come to experience themselves as agents who can cause events in the world by acting? This ability — known as ‘sense of agency’ — cannot be taken for granted in infancy. Yet, somehow, it rapidly develops from infancy into childhood. Children's understanding of the causal efficacy of their own actions is of such sophistication that they can use their own actions as interventions to learn about the causal structure of the world. In other words, a sense of agency allows children to learn from interacting with their social and physical world in ways that would not be possible otherwise [1], and may thus be crucial for human cognitive development in general.