Agency Judgments Research Articles

Metacognition of agency: proximal action and distal outcome

The cues contributing to people's metacognitions of agency were investigated in two experiments in which people played a computer game that involved trying to "touch", via a mouse moving a cursor, downward scrolling X's (Experiment 1), or trying to "explode" the downward scrolling X's (Experiment 2). Both experiments varied (a) proximal action-related information by either introducing or not introducing Turbulence into the mouse controls and (b) distal outcome-related information such that touched X's "exploded" either 100 or 75% of the time. Both variables affected people's judgments of agency (JOAs), but the effect was different. First, the decrement in feelings of agency was greater with the proximal variable than with distal variable. Second, while the proximal variable always had a large direct effect on JOAs, even taking judgments of performance (JOPs) into account, JOPs completely accounted for the effect of the distal variable in Experiment 1, where the instructions were just to touch the X's. And even in Experiment 2, in which the instructions were to explode the X's, the direct effect of the distal variable on JOAs was small. These data indicate that these two cues exhibit different psychological profiles. The proximal action-related information is a diagnostic cue to agency indicating the match between one's own intentions and actions. Internal monitoring of intentions is necessary and so the self is implicated. However, distal outcome can be largely monitored using information external to the agent, and so-while it is used by people to make agency judgments-it is a non-diagnostic cue.

自己主体判断における手がかり統合プロセス

The sense of self-agency is the sense that "I am the one" causing an action. Previous studies showed that multiple cues (such as congruency between prediction and actual effects, and conceptual congruency between preview and effects) contributed to explicit judgments of agency. This study independently manipulated these cues to investigate how such multiple cues of agency are integrated to form an attribution of agency. The results showed that when action became a reliably predictive cue of the occurrence of the outcome through preceding learning trials, then the congruency between prediction and actual effects received a higher weighting for a judgment of agency, and conceptual congruency received a relatively lower weighting. In contrast, without a prior learning session, the conceptual congruency, instead of the congruency between prediction and actual effects, received a relatively higher weighting for a judgment of agency. These results support the optimal cue integration hypothesis that the sense of agency reflects the relative reliability of the respective agency cues in a given situation.

The Role of the Regulatory Asset Base as an Instrument of Regulatory Commitment

This paper discusses the emergence and evolution of the regulatory asset base (RAB) as a key aspect of infrastructure industry regulation in the UK and other countries. In Britain, the RAB emerged during the 1990s after privatization of the main network infrastructure industries. It was initially developed for the England and Wales water industry, but its use spread to UK energy (primarily networks), to railway networks and to the fixed line telecom network. A key feature of the RAB is that it nowhere appears in primary legislation. The paper discusses and presents evidence that the most important feature of the RAB is the process by which the RAB is reassessed and revised and that this provides considerable evidence on the consistency and transparency of regulatory regimes. The quality of this process varies considerably by country and these differences seem to be reflected in ratings agency judgments and share price movements. In the UK, Australia and some other countries, the RAB model has provided a considerable degree of protection against retrospective ‘asset taking’ without imposing the rigidities of the full US ‘rate base’ model.

Judgements of agency in schizophrenia: an impairment in autonoetic metacognition

We investigated judgements of agency in participants with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Participants engaged in a computer game in which they attempted to touch downward falling Xs and avoid touching Os. On some trials, participants were objectively in perfect control. On other trials, they were objectively not in complete control because the movement of the cursor on the screen was distorted with respect to the position of the mouse by random noise (turbulence), or it was lagged by 250 or 500 ms. Participants made metacognitive judgements of agency as well as judgements of performance. Control participants' judgements of agency were affected by the turbulence and lag variables-indicating that they knew they were objectively not in control in those conditions, and they were also influenced by their assessments of performance. The patients also used their assessments of performance but neither turbulence nor lag affected their judgements of agency. This indicated an impairment in agency monitoring. The patients, unlike the healthy controls, used only publically available external cues about performance in making judgements of 'agency' and did not rely on any additional access to internal self-relevant cues that were diagnostic in indicating whether or not they were, in fact, in control.

Reasons as Experiments: Judgment and Justification in the “Hard Look”

Arbitrariness review of agency rulemakings has long set political influences aside as a special case worthy of special scrutiny. This essay argues that the orthodox account of arbitrariness review in this vein makes some untenable assumptions about both reviewing courts and agencies as agents. If we seek more agency responsiveness to reason rightly defined, then reviewing courts must begin devoting more (scarce) cognitive resources to the monitoring of agencies' behaviors over time. Reviewing courts should encourage agencies to organize themselves in order to leam-by-doing. This will probably entail paying less attention to the separation of law from fact, science from politics, and from justification.Arbitrariness review of agency rulemakings has long set political influences aside as a special case worthy of special scrutiny. Reviews of agency judgment as apart from the review of legal conclusions or findings of fact normally target just such influences. This essay argues that the orthodox account of arbitrariness review in this vein makes some untenable assumptions about both reviewing courts and agencies as agents.I first argues that agencies are essentially expert systems, composited together from the spectrum of epistemic domains and professional traditions, leaving them uniquely dependent on the very political actors who cycle in and out and bring their political biases with them as they come and go. Second, I argue that reviewing courts have come to define their own tasks in arbitrariness review in such fantastically ambitious terms that no mortal could possibly discharge those tasks competently. Because of the adversarial processes by which our courts operate, the predicament is made worse as judges must construct law out of the complex statutory materials of today at the same time they must scrutinize the work of ostensibly expert organizations, all while being forbidden from trusting fully the submissions of their litigants. If a agency adapts its own behavior to the known biases of reviewing courts, agency learning will simply exacerbate this predicament still further.If we seek more agency responsiveness to reason rightly defined, then I argue that reviewing courts must begin devoting more (scarce) cognitive resources to the monitoring of agencies' behaviors over time. In particular, reviewing courts should encourage agencies to organize themselves in order to leam-by-doing. This will probably entail paying less attention to the separation of law from fact, science from politics, and from justification. Finally, I argue that those separations are at best matters of degree (and probably pure fiction) and have not served us well, all things considered.We routinely talk of policy and political influences in the making of administrative regulations. Agency judgments that include such considerations have long been a special case in administrative law. But what role do these influences really play in agency judgment? Administrative rulemakings today are subjected to external forces of many kinds, some laying emphasis on the supposedly rational process of summing the relevant reasons and some laying emphasis on the action's wider public salience. And an agency's decisionmaking process, whatever its actual character, is usually held in contrast to the more political moments in government where winners reward the loyal for their loyalty, say, or act out of their own venality. In this paper, I shall argue that separating these two ideal types of decision-making for purposes of judicial review of agency rulemakings is much harder than the conventional thinking assumes. Most of the empirical work on these questions is predicated on this basic misjudgment and most courts' professed attitudes about judicial review rest upon it as well. Courts and their modes of review, I shall argue, cannot achieve a good perspective on agency decisions in rulemakings. Thus, they are poor judges of agency reasonableness, at least if by that notion we mean agencies' responsiveness to reason rightly defined. …

Automation Technology and Sense of Control: A Window on Human Agency

Previous studies have shown that the perceived times of voluntary actions and their effects are perceived as shifted towards each other, so that the interval between action and outcome seems shortened. This has been referred to as ‘intentional binding’ (IB). However, the generality of this effect remains unclear. Here we demonstrate that Intentional Binding also occurs in complex control situations. Using an aircraft supervision task with different autopilot settings, our results first indicated a strong relation between measures of IB and different levels of system automation. Second, measures of IB were related to explicit agency judgement in this applied setting. We discuss the implications for the underlying mechanisms, and for sense of agency in automated environments.

Aberrant sense of agency in patients with schizophrenia: Forward and backward over-attribution of temporal causality during intentional action

Self-disturbances in schizophrenia have been explained and studied from the standpoint of an abnormal sense of agency. We devised an agency-attribution task that evaluated explicit experiences of the temporal causal relations between an intentional action and an external event, without any confounding from sense of ownership of body movement. In each trial, a square piece appeared on the bottom of a computer screen and moved upward. Subjects were instructed to press a key when they heard a beep. When the key was pressed, the piece jumped with various temporal biases. Subjects were instructed to make an agency judgment for each trial. We demonstrated that an excessive sense of agency was observed in patients with schizophrenia compared with normal controls. Moreover, patient groups had a greater tendency to feel a sense of agency even when external events were programmed to precede their action. Therefore, patients felt both forward and backward exaggerated causal efficacy in the temporal event sequence during the intentional action. Confusion in the experience of temporal causal relations between the self and the external world may underlie self-disturbances in schizophrenia.

Dysfunctional Forward Model Mechanisms and Aberrant Sense of Agency in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often lack the experience of action completion and have altered feelings of agency. This might depend on the integrity of predictions of action outcomes generated by forward models of the motor system. Such motor predictions are critical for inhibitory gating of actions and their consequences. Therefore, it was hypothesized that OCD patients show compromised forward model mechanisms. To test whether inhibitory gating based on motor predictions is altered in OCD, we used electroencephalography to measure suppression of the N1 component of the event-related potential during active generation and passive observation of visual feedback in 18 OCD patients and 18 healthy control subjects. Predictability of action feedback was manipulated on the basis of action and external cues, and simultaneous agency judgments were assessed. OCD patients showed significantly reduced N1 suppression to actively generated feedback as compared with passively observed feedback. Moreover, in OCD patients, the N1 was not modulated by additional predictive motor cues as observed in control subjects. Patients also reported enhanced estimations of agency experience, which correlated with the strength of incompleteness feelings. OCD patients fail to predict and suppress the sensory consequences of their own actions. The increased mismatch between expected and actual outcomes caused by this forward model dysfunction may explain persistent feelings of incompleteness even after properly executed actions and the augmented search for control in these patients.

What is an “appropriate” migrant? Impact of the adoption of meritocratic worldviews by potential newcomers on their perceived ability to integrate into a Western society

AbstractThe acceptance of migrant populations and the definition of an “appropriate” migrant are controversial issues in many countries. The present research focuses on the ideological determinants of how newcomers are evaluated by a host population in a Western country with a strongly rooted meritocratic ideology. We carried out two studies to examine how the expression of meritocratic beliefs by a male potential migrant affects the way he is evaluated by the host population. We measured the host population's perception of the potential migrant's ability to integrate into society, his tendency to adopt the host country's culture, and the general desirability of his world vision for all newcomers. We also noted the host population's judgments of the target's agency and communality. The results showed that a potential newcomer who expresses a strong (vs. weak) belief in a just world (Study 1) or an internal (vs. external) locus of control (Study 2) is evaluated more favorably by the host population. In addition, judgments of the target's integration capacity were only mediated by his perceived agency. We discuss these results in the light of work on the meritocratic ideology and intercultural relations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Agency, gait and self-consciousness

Agency is an important aspect of bodily self-consciousness, allowing us to separate own movements from those induced by the environment and to distinguish own movements from those of other agents. Unsurprisingly, theoretical frameworks for agency such as central monitoring are closely tied to computational models of sensorimotor control. Until recently agency research has largely focussed on goal‐directed movements of the upper limbs. In particular, the influence of performance-related sensory cues and the relevance of prediction signals for agency judgements have been studied through a variety of spatio‐temporal mismatches between movement and the sensory consequences of movement. However, agents often perform a different type of movement; highly automated movements that involve the entire body such as walking, cycling, and swimming with potentially different agency mechanisms.Here, we review recent work about agency for full‐body movements such as gait, highlighting the effects of performance‐related visual and auditory cues on gait agency. Gait movements differ from upper limb actions. Gait is cyclic, more rarely immediately goal-directed, and is generally considered one of the most automatic and unconscious actions. We discuss such movement differences with respect to the functional mechanisms of full‐body agency and body-part agency by linking these gait agency paradigms to computational models of motor control. This is followed by a selective review of gait control, locomotion, and models of motor control relying on prediction signals and underlining their relevance for full-body agency.

Reliability of sensory predictions determines the experience of self-agency

This study examines the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the sense of agency, that is, the experience of causing and controlling events in our environment. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that the sense of agency depends on an optimal integration of different anticipatory signals, generated by motor and nonmotor systems. An established marker of pre-reflective agency experience is the suppression of cortical responses to actively generated feedback as compared to passively observed feedback, which was measured here by event-related potentials (ERPs). Sensory expectations based on motor-related and unrelated signals were induced by varying the probabilistic contingency between action and feedback, and by priming the feedback prior to the action. Moreover, simultaneous conscious agency judgments were assessed. A reduction of visual N1 response was found to self- as compared to externally generated feedback. In addition, the N1 was modulated by accurate anticipations based on prime stimuli, independent of the precision of motor predictions. Conscious agency judgments, in contrast, were enhanced by prime stimuli only in situations where no precise motor predictions of the action feedback were available. These results indicate that anticipatory signals arising from motor and nonmotor systems are integrated differently depending on the level of agency processing. Our findings suggest that, at a pre-reflective level, the brain's agency system relies on both embodied signals and nonmotor sensory expectations. At higher cognitive levels, motor and nonmotor cues are weighted differently depending on their relative reliability in a given context, thereby providing a basis for robust agentive self-awareness.

The Impact of Social Roles on Trait Judgments

Consistent with social role theory's assumption that the role behavior of men and women shapes gender stereotypes, earlier experiments have found that men's and women's occupancy of the same role eliminated gender-stereotypical judgments of greater agency and lower communion in men than women. The shifting standards model raises the question of whether a shift to within-sex standards in judgments of men and women in roles could have masked underlying gender stereotypes. To examine this possibility, two experiments obtained judgments of men and women using measures that do or do not restrain shifts to within-sex standards. This measure variation did not affect the social role pattern of smaller perceived sex differences in the presence of role information. These findings thus support the social role theory claim that designations of identical roles for subgroups of men and women eliminate or reduce perceived sex differences.

Whodunnit? Electrophysiological Correlates of Agency Judgements

Sense of agency refers to the feeling that “I” am responsible for those external events that are directly produced by one's own voluntary actions. Recent theories distinguish between a non-conceptual “feeling” of agency linked to changes in the processing of self-generated sensory events, and a higher-order judgement of agency, which attributes sensory events to the self. In the current study we explore the neural correlates of the judgement of agency by means of electrophysiology. We measured event-related potentials to tones that were either perceived or not perceived as triggered by participants' voluntary actions and related these potentials to later judgements of agency over the tones. Replicating earlier findings on predictive sensory attenuation, we found that the N1 component was attenuated for congruent tones that corresponded to the learned action-effect mapping as opposed to incongruent tones that did not correspond to the previously acquired associations between actions and tones. The P3a component, but not the N1, directly reflected the judgement of agency: deflections in this component were greater for tones judged as self-generated than for tones judged as externally produced. The fact that the outcome of the later agency judgement was predictable based on the P3a component demonstrates that agency judgements incorporate early information processing components and are not purely reconstructive, post-hoc evaluations generated at time of judgement.

I Did It: Unconscious Expectation of Sensory Consequences Modulates the Experience of Self-agency and Its Functional Signature

The ability to recognize oneself in voluntary action is called the sense of agency and refers to the experience of causing one's own actions and their sensory consequences. This form of self-awareness is important not only for motor control but also for social interactions and the ascription of causal responsibility. Here, we examined the sense of agency at early and prereflective stages of action perception using ERPs. Subjects performed a visual forced-choice response task in which action effects were either caused by the subject or by the computer. In addition, to modulate the conscious experience of agency, action effects were subliminally primed by the presentation of congruent, incongruent, or neutral effect stimuli before the action. First, we observed sensorimotor attenuation in the visual ERP selectively for self-generated action effects. That is, the N1 component, a negative deflection around 100 msec after a visual stimulus, was smaller in amplitude for visual effects caused by the subject as compared with effects caused by the computer. Second, congruent effect priming enhanced the explicit judgment of agency and further reduced the N1 amplitude for self-generated effects, although effect primes were not consciously processed. Taken together, these results provide evidence of a top-down modulation of sensory processing of action effects by prior effect information and support the neurophysiological mechanism of sensorimotor attenuation as underlying self-registration in action. Our findings suggest that both efferent information and prior thoughts about the action consequence provide important cues for a prereflective form of the experience of being an agent.

The experience of agency in sequence production with altered auditory feedback

When speaking or producing music, people rely in part on auditory feedback - the sounds associated with the performed action. Three experiments investigated the degree to which alterations of auditory feedback (AAF) during music performances influence the experience of agency (i.e., the sense that your actions led to auditory events) and the possible link between agency and the disruptive effect of AAF on production. Participants performed short novel melodies from memory on a keyboard. Auditory feedback during performances was manipulated with respect to its pitch contents and/or its synchrony with actions. Participants rated their experience of agency after each trial. In all experiments, AAF reduced judgments of agency across conditions. Performance was most disrupted (measured by error rates and slowing) when AAF led to an ambiguous experience of agency, suggesting that there may be some causal relationship between agency and disruption. However, analyses revealed that these two effects were probably independent. A control experiment verified that performers can make veridical judgments of agency.

Dissociating Neural Correlates of Action Monitoring and Metacognition of Agency

Judgments of agency refer to people's self-reflective assessments concerning their own control: their assessments of the extent to which they themselves are responsible for an action. These self-reflective metacognitive judgments can be distinguished from action monitoring, which involves the detection of the divergence (or lack of divergence) between observed states and expected states. Presumably, people form judgments of agency by metacognitively reflecting on the output of their action monitoring and then consciously inferring the extent to which they caused the action in question. Although a number of previous imaging studies have been directed at action monitoring, none have assessed judgments of agency as a potentially separate process. The present fMRI study used an agency paradigm that not only allowed us to examine the brain activity associated with action monitoring but that also enabled us to investigate those regions associated with metacognition of agency. Regarding action monitoring, we found that being "out of control" during the task (i.e., detection of a discrepancy between observed and expected states) was associated with increased brain activity in the right TPJ, whereas being "in control" was associated with increased activity in the pre-SMA, rostral cingulate zone, and dorsal striatum (regions linked to self-initiated action). In contrast, when participants made self-reflective metacognitive judgments about the extent of their own control (i.e., judgments of agency) compared with when they made judgments that were not about control (i.e., judgments of performance), increased activity was observed in the anterior PFC, a region associated with self-reflective processing. These results indicate that action monitoring is dissociable from people's conscious self-attributions of control.

Self-motion holds a special status in visual processing.

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.

Finding the self in metacognitive evaluations: Metamemory and agency in nondemented elders.

Metacognitive methodologies are used to examine the integrity of self-referential processing in healthy adults and have been implemented to study disorders of the self-concept in neurologic and psychiatric populations. However, the extent to which metacognitive evaluations assess a uniquely self-evaluative capacity that cannot be explained fully by primary cognitive functions, demographics, or mood is not clear. The objective of the current study was to examine whether metamemory and a metacognitive test of agency shared a self-referential association that would not be explained by cognition, demographics, or mood. Thirty-eight nondemented older adults (Mini Mental State Examination [MMSE] ≥24 and mean age = 68.13) participated in metacognitive testing and completed cognitive testing and mood questionnaires. Bivariate correlations were used to evaluate the association between metamemory and agency, and to determine the cognitive (memory, attention, and executive functioning), demographic (age and education), and mood (anxiety and depression) correlates of each. Correlates of metamemory and agency were then entered into linear regression models to determine whether any association between metacognitive measures remained. Metamemory was associated with agency judgments (n = 27), specifically those on self-controlled rather than computer-controlled trials (r = .41, p = .03). Regression results supported a role for agency in predicting metamemory, above and beyond memory and education (β = .39, p = .034). Metamemory was also an independent predictor of agency judgments (β = .36, p = .049). The interrelation between metamemory and agency judgments suggests that metacognitive testing captures an important aspect of self-referential processing not otherwise assessed in a standard cognitive evaluation and may provide unique information about self-evaluative capacities in clinical populations.

Newcomers to the U.S.: Developing Historical Thinking Among Latino Immigrant Students in a Central Texas High School

Newcomers are a special subgroup of the student population designated as English Language Learners (ELLs). The research project described in this article investigates how a teacher integrated language and content in a single subject area, social studies, in a high school newcomer classroom. Three extended lessons were presented to newcomer students in Central Texas who are native speakers of Spanish. The case study in the newcomer classroom documented immigrant students' use of digitized primary resources and document-based questions pertaining to the social crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957; the civil rights concerns of the Chicano Movimiento of the 1960s and 1970s; and the U.S. public's conflicting responses to immigration, particularly from Mexico, in the 21st century. Each extended lesson required that the students systematically understand sources; contexts; historical significance; and notions of agency, empathy, and moral judgment. Despite the challenge of specific concepts in the social studies curriculum, findings show that the interactive use of digitized primary source documents available in English made the subject relevant and meaningful to the newcomer students. The choice to use (or not) the home language for oral and written responses played a significant role in the students' understanding and use of historical thinking.

Sense of agency in joint action: influence of human and computer co-actors

Intentional binding is the perceived shortening of the time between a voluntary action and its consequent effect and has been suggested as an implicit measure of agency. This shortening has been linked to processes underlying action preparation and is also affected by post-movement feedback. Intentional binding has been demonstrated in joint action tasks involving two humans, but it is unknown whether it occurs for tasks involving a human working alongside a non-human partner. This experiment investigated the influence of high-level feedback on the experience of agency and whether binding occurs in human-computer joint action settings. Participants were involved in two versions an action task involving another 'agent'. In one version, two participants (a genuine participant and a confederate) sat side by side, separated by a curtain that prevented vision of the other person. In baseline conditions, both participants were instructed to make a self-paced action and judge the time of the action by reporting the position of a rotating clock-hand on a computer screen. In other baseline conditions, participants judged the time of an auditory tone. In operant conditions, participants made actions and the genuine participant's action was followed 200ms later by a tone on every trial. To examine the effect of post-movement information on binding and explicit agency judgments, a colour cue was presented on each trial informing participants about which person's action caused the tone. In another version of the task, participants were paired with a computer instead of a human co-actor. Post-movement information affected the genuine participant's explicit agency judgments but had no effect on intentional binding, which always occurred. In the human-computer version, participants never showed binding, even when they explicitly judged that their action had caused the tone. We suggest that human-human partnerships result in the formation of a new 'we' agentic identity, but that human-computer partnerships lead to inhibition of the processes that mediate the pre-reflective sense of agency.