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The present study investigated the sense of agency (SoA) when actions were determined by another human vs. a humanoid robot as compared to when freely selected. Additionally, perceived robot-autonomy was manipulated via autonomous vs. non-autonomous descriptions of the robot. SoA was assessed by judgment of control ratings and intentional binding (i.e., perceived temporal attraction between voluntary actions and their outcomes). Participants performed free and instructed key presses that produced an auditory tone (Experiment-1) and visual stimuli conveying neutral, positive, or negative valence (Experiment-2). Binding and control ratings were greater in free compared to instructed actions, and comparable between human- and robot-instructed actions. Control ratings were higher for positive compared to neutral and negative outcomes, and positively correlated with ratings of how human-like the robot appeared. These results highlight the role of endogenous processing of action selection and provide preliminary insight into the SoA when actions are guided by artificial agents.

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RESUMEN

Sense of agency (SoA) refers to the subjective experience that one is in control of their actions and the consequences of these actions. The SoA is a complex phenomenon, influenced by a weighted combination of various prospective (pre-movement) and retrospective (post-movement) processes and factors related to action choice, action selection fluency, action-outcome associations and higher-level inferences. In the current study, we examined the effect of the congruency between actions and outcomes in a context where the choice-level of actions was varied from 1 to 4. The actions consisted of right, left, up and down key presses while the outcomes were visual representations of the actions (i.e., right, left, up and down-pointing arrowheads). Participants performed either an instructed action or freely selected an action among two, three, or four alternatives. Each action randomly produced either a congruent or an incongruent outcome, depending on the matching between the direction of the key press and the direction of the outcome arrowhead. Participants estimated the delay between their actions and the observed outcomes and reported their feeling of control (FoC) over the outcomes. Interval estimations were used as an indirect measure of the SoA to quantify the intentional binding effect, which refers to the perceived temporal attraction between voluntary actions and their outcomes. The results showed that both intentional binding and FoC were enhanced as the choice-level was increased from 1 to 4. Additionally, intentional binding and FoC over the outcomes were stronger when actions produced congruent compared to incongruent outcomes. These results provide additional evidence that both intentional binding and FoC are sensitive to the number of action alternatives and the congruency between actions and their outcomes. Importantly, the current study suggests that these prospective and retrospective cues might independently influence intentional binding and FoC judgments.

RESUMEN

Everyday actions can be characterized by whether they are freely chosen or commanded by external stimuli, and whether they produce pleasant or unpleasant outcomes. To assess how these aspects of actions affect the sense of agency, we asked participants to perform freely selected or instructed key presses which could produce pleasant or unpleasant chords. We obtained estimates of the key press-chord intervals and ratings of the feeling of control (FoC) over the outcomes. Interval estimates were used to assess intentional binding-the perceived temporal attraction between actions and their outcomes. Results showed stronger binding and higher FoC ratings in the free compared to instructed condition. Additionally, FoC was stronger for pleasant compared to unpleasant outcomes, and for pleasant outcomes that were produced by freely selected compared to instructed actions. These results highlight the importance of free choice and outcome valence on the SoA. They also reveal how freedom of action selection and pleasantness of action-outcomes can interact to affect the FoC.

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Previous research showed that increasing the number of action alternatives enhances the sense of agency (SoA). Here, we investigated whether choice space could affect subjective judgments of mental effort experienced during action selection and examined the link between subjective effort and the SoA. Participants performed freely selected (among two, three, or four options) and instructed actions that produced pleasant or unpleasant tones. We obtained action-effect interval estimates to quantify intentional binding - the perceived interval compression between actions and outcomes and feeling of control (FoC) ratings. Additionally, participants reported the degree of mental effort they experienced during action selection. We found that both binding and FoC were systematically enhanced with increasing choice-level. Outcome valence did not influence binding, while FoC was stronger for pleasant than unpleasant outcomes. Finally, freely chosen actions were associated with low subjective effort and slow responses (i.e., higher reaction times), and instructed actions were associated with high effort and fast responses. Although the conditions that yielded the greatest and least subjective effort also yielded the greatest and least binding and FoC, there was no significant correlation between subjective effort and SoA measures. Overall, our results raise interesting questions about how agency may be influenced by response selection demands (i.e., indexed by speed of responding) and subjective mental effort. Our work also highlights the importance of understanding how subjective mental effort and response speed are related to popular notions of fluency in response selection.

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The sense of agency is suggested to occur at both low and high levels by the involvement of sensorimotor processes and the contribution of retrospective inferences based on contextual cues. In the current study, we recruited western and non-western participants and examined the effect of pleasantness of action outcomes on both feeling of control ratings and intentional binding which refers to the perceived compression of the temporal delay between actions and outcomes. We found that both western and non-western groups showed greater feeling of control ratings for the consonant (pleasant) compared to dissonant (unpleasant) outcomes. The intentional binding effect, on the other hand, was stronger for the consonant compared to dissonant outcomes in the western group only. We discuss the results in relation to how cultural background might differentially influence the effect of outcome pleasantness on low and high levels of the sense of agency.

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RESUMEN

The sense of agency is an intriguing aspect of human consciousness and is commonly defined as the sense that one is the author of their own actions and their consequences. In the current study, we varied the number of action alternatives (one, three, seven) that participants could select from and determined the effects on intentional binding which is believed to index the low-level sense of agency. Participants made self-paced button presses while viewing a conventional Libet clock and reported the perceived onset time of either the button presses or consequent auditory tones. We found that the binding effect was strongest when participants had the maximum number of alternatives, intermediate when they had medium level of action choice and lowest when they had no choice. We interpret our results in relation to the potential link between agency and the freedom to choose one's actions.

RESUMEN

This paper presents statistical procedures for improving the goodness-of-fit testing of theoretical models to data obtained from laboratory experiments. We use an experimental study in the expectation states research tradition which has been carried out in the "standardized experimental situation" associated with the program to illustrate the application of our procedures. We briefly review the expectation states research program and the fundamentals of resampling statistics as we develop our procedures in the resampling context. The first procedure we develop is a modification of the chi-square test which has been the primary statistical tool for assessing goodness of fit in the EST research program, but has problems associated with its use. We discuss these problems and suggest a procedure to overcome them. The second procedure we present, the "Average Absolute Deviation" test, is a new test and is proposed as an alternative to the chi square test, as being simpler and more informative. The third and fourth procedures are permutation versions of Jonckheere's test for ordered alternatives, and Kendall's tau(b), a rank order correlation coefficient. The fifth procedure is a new rank order goodness-of-fit test, which we call the "Deviation from Ideal Ranking" index, which we believe may be more useful than other rank order tests for assessing goodness-of-fit of models to experimental data. The application of these procedures to the sample data is illustrated in detail. We then present another laboratory study from an experimental paradigm different from the expectation states paradigm - the "network exchange" paradigm, and describe how our procedures may be applied to this data set.