The Sense of Agency Is More Sensitive to Manipulations of Outcome than Movement-Related Feedback Irrespective of Sensory Modality

Abstract

The sense of agency describes the ability to experience oneself as the agent of one's own actions. Previous studies of the sense of agency manipulated the predicted sensory feedback related either to movement execution or to the movement’s outcome, for example by delaying the movement of a virtual hand or the onset of a tone that resulted from a button press. Such temporal sensorimotor discrepancies reduce the sense of agency. It remains unclear whether movement-related feedback is processed differently than outcome-related feedback in terms of agency experience, especially if these types of feedback differ with respect to sensory modality. We employed a mixed-reality setup, in which participants tracked their finger movements by means of a virtual hand. They performed a single tap, which elicited a sound. The temporal contingency between the participants’ finger movements and (i) the movement of the virtual hand or (ii) the expected auditory outcome was systematically varied. In a visual control experiment, the tap elicited a visual outcome. For each feedback type and participant, changes in the sense of agency were quantified using a forced-choice paradigm and the Method of Constant Stimuli. Participants were more sensitive to delays of outcome than to delays of movement execution. This effect was very similar for visual or auditory outcome delays. Our results indicate different contributions of movement- versus outcome-related sensory feedback to the sense of agency, irrespective of the modality of the outcome. We propose that this differential sensitivity reflects the behavioral importance of assessing authorship of the outcome of an action.

Seeing your own or someone else's hand moving in accordance with your action: The neural interaction of agency and hand identity

“…In contrast, in studies showing suppression effects (including the current study), participants had to perform continuous movements with relatively large trajectories that were continuously displayed on a screen. It has been shown that participants are more sensitive to discrete action‐outcome asynchronies than to movement‐related feedback (David, Skoruppa, Gulberti, Schultz, & Engel, ). Moreover, it has been reported that sensory suppression specifically occurs during movement execution (Juravle, Deubel, Tan, & Spence, ).…”

Influence of Being Embodied in an Obese Virtual Body on Shopping Behavior and Products Perception in VR

“… Agency : the sense of having the subjective experience of action, i.e., “global motor control”. It is the feeling that the person is the agent of its own actions, and is highlighted if there is correspondence between the perceived and the actual consequence of an action (David et al, 2016 ). Body Ownership : one's self-attribution of a body.…”

The Moving Rubber Hand Illusion Reveals that Explicit Sense of Agency for Tapping Movements Is Preserved in Functional Movement Disorders

“…The sense of agency is the feeling of control over one’s own action. This basic cognitive function allows to distinguish between self-generated and externally generated movements ( David et al, 2016 ). According to computational models of motor control such as the comparator model ( Frith et al, 2000 ; Blakemore et al, 2002 ; Chambon et al, 2014 ), a sense of agency arises from the matching between the predicted and the actual sensory outcome of intended actions.…”