Abstract
Humans experience themselves as agents, capable of controlling their actions and the outcomes they generate (i.e., the sense of agency). Inferences of agency are not infallible. Research shows that we often attribute outcomes to our agency even though they are caused by another agent. Moreover, agents report the sensory events they generate to be less intense compared to the events that are generated externally. These effects have been assessed using highly suprathreshold stimuli and subjective measurements. Consequently, it remains unclear whether experiencing oneself as an agent lead to a decision criterion change and/or a sensitivity change. Here, we investigate this issue. Participants were told that their key presses generated an upward dot motion but that on 30 % of the trials the computer would take over and display a downward motion. The upward/downward dot motion was presented at participant’s discrimination threshold. Participants were asked to indicate whether they (upward motion) or the computer (downward motion) generated the motion. This group of participants was compared with a ‘no-agency’ group who performed the same task except that subjects did not execute any actions to generate the dot motion. We observed that the agency group reported seeing more frequently the motion they expected to generate (i.e., upward motion) than the no-agency group. This suggests that agency distorts our experience of (allegedly) caused events by altering perceptual decision processes, so that, in ambiguous contexts, externally generated events are experienced as the outcomes of one’s actions.
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Notes
Two participants added that they started to doubt that they were generating the dot motion toward the last two blocks.
As motion direction visibility varied across trials in the preliminary experiment, mean Reaction Times are not meaningful hence are not reported.
One participant in the agency group had 100 % hit rate for the 300 ms SOA. For this particular condition and participant we used the 1/N adjustment suggested by Hautus and Lee (2006). The method consists in replacing the number of hits, Nh, with 1/Ns (where Ns is the number of signal trials) if Nh = 0, and with Nh − (1/Ns) if Nh = Ns. Other corrections have also been recommended (see Macmillan and Creelman 2005). One of these consists in replacing a 100 % hit rate with 1 − (1/2Ns). However, the Nh − (1/Ns) correction was shown to minimize the variance and confidence intervals of d' as long as Nh > 100 (see Hautus and Lee 2006). As the 1 − (1/2Ns) adjustment yielded a main group effect for c with p = 0.052 (while the alternative 1 − 1/Ns yields a p = 0.048) we are confident in concluding that the presently observed c-difference was significant at p = 0.05.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Ilona Kovacs for constructive discussions while this project was in its conception phase. We are grateful to Vivianne Huet for data collection. F. Waszak was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement 263067. A. Gorea was supported by a grant de l’Agence National de la recherche ANR-12-BSH2-0005-01.
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Desantis, A., Waszak, F. & Gorea, A. Agency alters perceptual decisions about action-outcomes. Exp Brain Res 234, 2819–2827 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4684-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4684-7