Sense of Agency and User Experience: Is There a Link?

Abstract

Sense of control is increasingly used as a measure of quality in human-computer interaction. Control has been investigated mainly at a high level, using subjective questionnaire data, but also at a low level, using objective data on participants’ sense of agency. However, it remains unclear how differences in higher level, experienced control reflect lower level sense of control. We study that link in two experiments. In the first one we measure the low-level sense of agency with button, touchpad, and on-skin input. The results show a higher sense of agency with on-skin input. In the second experiment, participants played a simple game controlled with the same three inputs. We find that on-skin input results in both increased sense and experience of control compared to touchpad input. However, the corresponding difference is not found between on-skin and button input, whereas the button performed better in the experiment task. These results suggest that other factors of user experience spill over to the experienced control at rates that overcome differences in the sense of control. We discuss the implications for using subjective measures about the sense of control in evaluating qualities of interaction.

Understanding the effects of hand design on embodiment in virtual reality

“…Participants felt the difference in time interval when they completed the experiment, but the difference in estimating the time interval with different virtual hands was not noticeable. In fact, the relationship between the self-reported and implicit (intentional binding) method of the agency was debated in the literature (Dewey and Knoblich, 2014; Bergström et al , 2022). Research has shown that there are dissociations between self-reported and implicit agency judgments (Dewey and Knoblich, 2014), while the correlation may be moderated by the performance of a recent study (Bergström et al , 2022).…”

“…In fact, the relationship between the self-reported and implicit (intentional binding) method of the agency was debated in the literature (Dewey and Knoblich, 2014; Bergström et al , 2022). Research has shown that there are dissociations between self-reported and implicit agency judgments (Dewey and Knoblich, 2014), while the correlation may be moderated by the performance of a recent study (Bergström et al , 2022). The finding formed the study also accords with the earlier observation (Dewey and Knoblich, 2014), which showed no relationship between the correlation of these two methods.…”

How does HCI Understand Human Autonomy and Agency?

“…This work focused exclusively on this very short time-scale, isolating agency in execution from issues of decision, self-congruence, and more generally from any wider interaction context. Six of these papers [15,16,[35][36][37]106] focused on the specific neuro-scientific construct sense-of-agency, which refers to the implicit sense of authorship of an action. The operationalision of this via millisecondlevel variations in a reaction-time metric -so-called intentional binding -was seen as promising for understanding "the awareness of owning the actions' outcomes" [35, p. 2426], and "how people experience interactions with technology" [37, p. 2025].…”

“…The operationalision of this via millisecondlevel variations in a reaction-time metric -so-called intentional binding -was seen as promising for understanding "the awareness of owning the actions' outcomes" [35, p. 2426], and "how people experience interactions with technology" [37, p. 2025]. However, two recent papers in this group noted the uncertain relationship of this measure to other constructs of agency, and their results indicated that the relationship of temporal binding to conscious user experience remained unclear [15,16].…”

“…This might, for example, mean introducing meaningful (self-congruent or incongruent) choices into existing experimental paradigms. Work in this direction might also help clarify open questions around how temporal binding measures relate to UX [15].…”