Illusions of control without delusions of grandeur

Abstract

We frequently experience feelings of agency over events we do not objectively influence – so-called ‘illusions of control’. These illusions have prompted widespread claims that we can be insensitive to objective relationships between actions and outcomes, and instead rely on grandiose beliefs about our abilities. However, these illusory biases could instead arise if we are highly sensitive to action-outcome correlations, but attribute agency when such correlations emerge simply by chance. We motion-tracked participants while they made agency judgements about a cursor that could be yoked to their actions or follow an independent trajectory. A combination of signal detection analysis, reverse correlation methods and computational modelling indeed demonstrated that ‘illusions’ of control could emerge solely from sensitivity to spurious action-outcome correlations. Counterintuitively, this suggests that illusions of control could arise because agents have excellent insight into the relationships between actions and outcomes in a world where causal relationships are not perfectly deterministic.

Investigating the sense of agency and its relation to subclinical traits using a novel task

“…In some paradigms, the sense of agency is compared when participants observe veridical visual feedback from their unseen actions, or false feedback from a previous movement (e.g. David et al 2007;Yon et al 2020). In these studies, it is not clear whether the reduced sense of agency felt while observing the false feedback is due to increased spatial deviation, reduced spatial predictability, or reductions in action-outcome contingency.…”

Cancelling cancellation? Sensorimotor control, agency, and prediction

“…First, feelings of agency and control can depend upon motor prediction processeseven if these processes do not change perception in a characteristic way. There is certainly strong evidence that feelings of control crucially depend on predictively tracking the fine-grained correspondence between actions and outcomes (Yon et al, 2020), but such processes could underwrite the sense of agency even if predictions do not act to cancel perception. By the same token, unusual experiences of action could arise due to disruptions in our ability to predict action outcomesand there is evidence for these kinds of generic distortions of action prediction in illnesses like schizophreniathat cannot be explained via a specific disruption of an attenuation mechanism (Synofzik et al, 2010).…”

Causal surgery under a Markov blanket

“…In their impressive target article (Dickinson & Balleine, 1994;Yon et al, 2020). However, building a cognitive blanketmapping causal dependencies between actions and states allows an agent to entertain counterfactual scenarios and to intervene on the world to test connections implied by their model.…”