Feelings of responsibility and temporal binding: A comparison of two measures of the sense of agency.

Temporal binding refers to a subjective shortening of the interval between an action and its perceptual consequences. Temporal binding has often been used by researchers to indirectly measure participants' sense of agency (SoA), or the subjective sense of causing something to happen. Other studies have proposed links between temporal binding and feelings of moral responsibility.

Cognitive load decreases the sense of agency during continuous action.

The sense of agency that normally accompanies voluntary actions depends on a combination of sensory predictions and other inferences. For example, when people manipulate moving objects and rate their degree of control, control ratings are influenced by proximal correlations between motor commands and visual feedback as well as the overall success or failure of the action. The relative importance of sensory predictions vs.

Do implicit and explicit measures of the sense of agency measure the same thing?

The sense of agency (SoA) refers to perceived causality of the self, i.e. the feeling of causing something to happen.

The phenomenology of controlling a moving object with another person.

The phenomenology of controlling what one perceives is influenced by a combination of sensory predictions and inferential processes. While it is known that external perturbations can reduce the sense of control over action effects, there have been few studies investigating the impact of intentional co-actors on the sense of control. In three experiments, we investigated how individuals' judgments of control (JoC) over a moving object were influenced by sharing control with a second person.

Predictable and self-initiated visual motion is judged to be slower than computer generated motion.

Self-initiated action effects are often perceived as less intense than identical but externally generated stimuli. It is thought that forward models within the sensorimotor system pre-activate cortical representations of predicted action effects, reducing perceptual sensitivity and attenuating neural responses. As self-agency and predictability are seldom manipulated simultaneously in behavioral experiments, it is unclear if self-other differences depend on predictable action effect contingencies, or if both self- and externally generated stimuli are modulated similarly by predictability.

When dyads act in parallel, a sense of agency for the auditory consequences depends on the order of the actions.

The sense of agency (SA) is the perception of willfully causing something to happen. Wegner and Wheatley (1999) proposed three prerequisites for SA: temporal contiguity between an action and its effect, congruence between predicted and observed effects, and exclusivity (absence of competing causal explanations). We investigated how temporal contiguity, congruence, and the order of two human agents' actions influenced SA on a task where participants rated feelings of self-agency for producing a tone.

Relationship between BOLD amplitude and pattern classification of orientation-selective activity in the human visual cortex.

Orientation-selective responses can be decoded from fMRI activity patterns in the human visual cortex, using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA). To what extent do these feature-selective activity patterns depend on the strength and quality of the sensory input, and might the reliability of these activity patterns be predicted by the gross amplitude of the stimulus-driven BOLD response? Observers viewed oriented gratings that varied in luminance contrast (4, 20 or 100%) or spatial frequency (0.25, 1.

Is that what I wanted to do? Cued vocalizations influence the phenomenology of controlling a moving object.

The phenomenology of controlled action depends on comparisons between predicted and actually perceived sensory feedback called action-effects. We investigated if intervening task-irrelevant but semantically related information influences monitoring processes that give rise to a sense of control. Participants judged whether a moving box "obeyed" or "disobeyed" their own arrow keystrokes (Experiments 1 and 2) or visual cues representing the computer's choices (Experiment 3).

Taking credit for success: the phenomenology of control in a goal-directed task.

We studied how people determine when they are in control of objects. In a computer task, participants moved a virtual boat towards a goal using a joystick to investigate how subjective control is shaped by (1) correspondence between motor actions and the visual consequences of those actions, and (2) attainment of higher-level goals. In Experiment 1, random discrepancies from joystick input (noise) decreased judgments of control (JoCs), but discrepancies that brought the boat closer to the goal and increased success (the autopilot) increased JoCs.