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Sense of agency is modulated by interactions between action choice, outcome valence, and predictability

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Takumi Tanaka at The University of Tokyo
Takumi Tanaka
Hideaki Kawabata at Keio University
Hideaki Kawabata
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Sense of agency is a feeling of control over one’s actions to cause sensory events in one’s environment. While previous studies investigated the role of action choice and emotional valence of action outcome in forming implicit agency, the results were not consistent and the relationship between these factors remains unclear. We manipulated both action alternatives available and emotional valences of sounds (either positive or negative) as action outcomes and measured the resultant intentional binding effects in two experiments that differed in predictability of outcome valence. When participants could not predict the valence of action outcomes, they showed stronger sense of agency for negative outcomes determined by their free choice (Experiment 1). Conversely, when participants’ actions caused only outcomes with specific valence, this interaction was not observed (Experiment 2). These findings imply that the implicit processes of agency reflect an integrative context-dependent cognition of consequence of action choice, prior to explicit attribution judgments.
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Sense of agency is modulated by interactions between action choice,
outcome valence, and predictability
Takumi Tanaka
1
&Hideaki Kawabata
2
#Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract
Sense of agency is a feeling of control over one’s actions to cause sensory events in one’s environment. While previous studies
investigated the role of action choice and emotional valence of action outcome in forming implicit agency, the results were not
consistent and the relationship between these factors remains unclear. We manipulated both action alternatives available and
emotional valences of sounds (either positive or negative) as action outcomes and measured the resultant intentional binding
effects in two experiments that differed in predictability of outcome valence. When participants could not predict the valence of
action outcomes, they showed stronger sense of agency for negative outcomes determined by their free choice (Experiment 1).
Conversely, when participants’actions caused only outcomes with specific valence, this interaction was not observed
(Experiment 2). These findings imply that the implicit processes of agency reflect an integrative context-dependent cognition
of consequence of action choice, prior to explicit attribution judgments.
Keywords Sense of agency .Intentional binding .Action choice .Emotional valence .Action-outcome predictability
Introduction
Based on environmental perception, humans consistently
choose their actions and then perceive sensory outcomes as
potential cues for the next action choice. This cycle is mediated
by Bsense of agency,^which is the feeling that one’s intentional
actions cause specific events in the outside world (Gallagher
2000). This experience of agency makes a person realize the
causal relationship between one’s actions and outcomes associ-
ated with reward or punishment and evokes cognitive, emotion-
al reactions to one’sown action outcomes. In particular, agency
over a negative outcome is linked to feelings of guilt, regret, or
responsibility and plays a critical role in the modification of
inappropriate behavior (Gentsch and Synofzik 2014).
However, like the case of learned helplessness (Seligman
1968), a perception of the close causal relationship between
actions and negative outcomes might only foment negative
emotional reaction, and cannot improve future behavior unless
one realizes a possibility to avoid them by their action choice.
Especially, when someone only obeys another’sordersorhasno
other action choices, people find it difficult to attribute the neg-
ative outcome to themselves and to feel agency or any negative
emotion, even for one’s voluntary actions (Mezulis et al. 2004).
Milgram’s(1963) famous study implied that this tendency could
distort emotional reactions to negative action outcomes and al-
low one to behave highly immorally in specific situations. It is
important to mention that agency is subject to the process of
action choice as well as the actual cause of action outcome (Frith
2014); thus, this process can contribute to the arousal of regret
and changing the choice of behavior (Bossuyt et al. 2014).
In previous studies, participants reported they had a keen
sense of agency over actions chosen by themselves, where
agency was measured by self-report (e.g., Lepron et al.
2015). However, since a sense of agency is naturally a vague
experience that is not consciously accessed in the usual situa-
tion, participants can have difficulty in quantifying the degree
of agency (Haggard and Chambon 2012). Moreover, partici-
pants’reports can be distorted to meet the demand character-
istics (Woolfolk et al. 2006). To avoid these problems, many
*Takumi Tanaka
kino31513@gmail.com
Hideaki Kawabata
kawabata@flet.keio.ac.jp
1
Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Human Relations,
Keio University, Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan
2
Department of Psychology, Keio University, Mita, Minato-ku,
Tokyo, Japan
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-0121-3
Published online: 5 January 2019
Current Psychology (2021) 40:1795–1806
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... The mistake-appraisal process might be why the larger negative-outcome-enhancement effect in the operant block was found. Previous research has shown that when participants are given the freedom to select their actions, unexpectedly negative outcomes heightened TB (Tanaka & Kawabata, 2021). However, this effect vanished when outcome valence became entirely predictable. ...
... This attempt to learn from negative outcomes may not be necessary in the update and observational blocks. In summary, the attempt to learn from errors appears to underlie the negative-outcome enhancement effect, sharing a similar mechanism with previous studies (Di Costa et al., 2018;Majchrowicz et al., 2020;Tanaka & Kawabata, 2021). Alternatively, the differences observed among the three blocks could be attributed to differences in perceived arousal. ...
... As we discussed above, the negative-outcome-enhancement effect in the operant block might be related to mistake-appraisal processes and the attempt to learn from negative outcomes. When negative outcomes are coupled with negative social feedback, as opposed to positive social feedback, it likely amplifies participants' perception of their actions as mistakes (Jenkins & Obhi, 2022) and motivates them to learn from these negative outcomes (Di Costa et al., 2018;Majchrowicz et al., 2020;Tanaka & Kawabata, 2021), leading to a more substantial contrast between the two types of outcomes. Likewise, positive social feedback may signal to participants that the values of negative and positive outcomes are similar, thereby diminishing the inclination of participants to perceive their actions as mistakes and to endeavor to learn from negative outcomes. ...
When Good Intention Goes Away: Social Feedback Modulates the Influence of Outcome Valence on Temporal Binding
Article
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  • Jan 2024
  • COGNITIVE SCI
The retrospective view of temporal binding (TB), the temporal contraction between one's actions and their effects, proposes that TB is influenced by what happens after the action. However, the role of the interaction between multiple sources of information following the action in the formation of TB has received limited attention. The current study aims to address this gap by investigating the combined influence of social feedback and outcome valence (i.e., positive or negative outcomes) on TB. In Experiment 1, the valenced outcome was followed by either positive or negative social feedback. The results showed that negative social feedback enlarged the difference between TB over negative and positive outcomes relative to positive social feedback. The modulatory effect of social feedback on TB was not observed in the absence of causal beliefs between actions and outcomes (Experiment 2). These results highlight the importance of considering the complex interplay between cognitive, emotional, and social factors in shaping our subjective temporal experience.
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... The reconstructive components of SoA, on the other hand, reflect the fact that other information, such as retrospective inferences triggered by sensory action outcomes, is also integrated into the experience of agency (Moore andObhi 2012, Gentsch andSynofzik 2014). In fact, existing evidence shows that the valence of movement outcomes influences the experience of agency, for example, in temporal binding , Takahata, Takahashi et al. 2012, Yoshie and Haggard 2013, Beck, Di Costa et al. 2017, Borhani, Beck et al. 2017, Di Costa, Théro et al. 2017, Yoshie and Haggard 2017, Tanaka and Kawabata 2019, sensory attenuation (Hughes and Waszak 2014, . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license made available under a (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. ...
... Furthermore, when the patient group was divided into two subgroups based on the severity of current OCD symptoms, we found that the more severe the current OCD symptoms of the patients, the more they relied on the strongly rotated visual feedback at the expense of their internal movement information in the other block. In contrast to previous studies however, we found no evidence thatapart from the influence of the social contextthe manipulation of valence through monetary gains vs. losses additionally affects the SoA (Takahata, Takahashi et al. 2012, Wilke, Synofzik et al. 2012, Yoshie and Haggard 2013, Tanaka and Kawabata 2019. Previous studies manipulating outcome valence have arrived at conflicting results, with reports suggesting both increased SoA for positive as well as negative outcomes. ...
Disturbance of the Sense of Agency in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and its Modulation by Social Context
Preprint
Full-text available
  • Jul 2024
Executing precise actions and perceiving them as one’s own is a fundamental ability underlying the sense of agency (SoA). The SoA thereby heavily relies on the accuracy and reliability of forward models, capturing sensory movement consequences. Impairments thereof thus represent a promising candidate mechanism contributing to cases of SoA pathogenesis. In obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), for example, the feeling of control over one’s actions is perturbed: Compulsive actions are often experienced as uncontrollable and performed without conscious awareness. At the same time, compulsions can be coupled with an inflated sense of illusory control for uncontrollable events. Here we studied self-action perception in virtual reality with and without veridical or rotated visual feedback about subjects’ pointing movements to test whether patients’ internal forward models are indeed less reliable compared to controls. Interestingly, OCD patients did not exhibit deficits in their accuracy and reliability of motor performance and self-action perception in the absence of visual feedback, suggesting intact forward models. Nonetheless, OCD patients weighted rotated visual action-feedback significantly stronger perceptually. Furthermore, they adapted their movement to this false feedback on a trial-by-trial basis. Finally, increasing the social relevance of action consequences led to stronger feedback weighting in all participants while this effect increased with the strength of OCD symptomatology under conditions with strongest social relevance. We suggest that internal forward models are equally reliable in OCD but their weight is pathologically decreased leading to patients’ overreliance on explicit visual action-feedback and, more generally, to their over-attribution of unrelated events to themselves.
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... Second, considering valence outcome, predictability, and occurrence, Christensen et al. (2016) found stronger IB when neutral outcome was expected but did not occur. Third, evaluating action selection by giving participants the possibility to choose between several keyboards to perform a voluntary action, Tanaka and Kawabata (2021) found that temporal compression was stronger with negative than with positive outcomes when unpredictable. Finally, evaluating the effect of intended outcome in binding, with participants themselves choosing the emotional valence of outcomes, Sarma and Srinivasan (2021) also showed that the intentional binding effect was larger for negative than for positive facial expressions, when they were both intended. ...
... Furthermore, Tanaka et al. (2021) found a stronger IB effect for negative than for positive outcomes only when stimuli were unpredictable, yielding null results when predictable. In one condition participants had the possibility of choosing one key to perform voluntary action, and in other they only could press several. ...
Assessing affective modulation of intentional binding effect: A 2AFC Psychophysics experiment with emotional words
Conference Paper
Full-text available
  • Jun 2024
Intentional binding (IB) is the experience of temporal interval compression between voluntary actions and subsequent events when the latter are perceived to be caused on purpose by the agent’s actions. It can be measured experimentally by comparing the judgments of temporal intervals between either a voluntary act or an external event, and a later sensory consequence. Evidence suggests this might be modulated by the emotional valence of the consequence. However, controversies have arisen over the consistency of the results and the methodology they were obtained with. Here, we aimed to measure this affective modulation using a two-interval forced-choice (2AFC) discrimination task and word stimuli. Three factors were employed: agency (agency and passive), emotional valence (neutral, positive, and negative words), and interval duration ratio determined based on individual values of just noticeable differences (JND). Participants had to judge which of two intervals presented in each trial was shorter. Generalized linear mixed model analysis indicated that there was an effect of IB, but no affective modulation. Dissociation of component mechanisms of SoA are discussed to better understand results and suggest further directions.
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... Even after eliminating the reciprocity element, which might introduce potential carry-over or automatization effects, we found a coercion effect on sense of agency. In addition, and similar to Caspar et al. 4 , our results demonstrated that the type of action outcomes (harm or no harm) did not significantly alter the perceived time intervals, underscoring the primacy of decision-making autonomy and freedom of choice over the action outcome in shaping agency 18,19 . Furthermore, our replication reinforces the perspective of Haggard and Chambon 20 , which posits that agency emerges as a metacognitive experience that is deeply rooted in the act of decision-making. ...
Obedience induces agentic shifts by increasing the perceived time between own action and results
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Full-text available
  • Jul 2024
The concept of 'agentic shift,' introduced by Stanley Milgram, suggests that obedience reduces the sense of agency. In a recent study simulating the seminal work of Milgram, Caspar et al., 2016 examined this idea in a financial harm context. They demonstrated that, compared to situations of voluntary decision-making, coercion increases the perceived time between action and outcomes—suggested as a marker of diminished agency. Importantly, in this study, participants were agent and victim (relying on a reciprocal relationship) and first experienced free choices, followed by forced choices. This diverts from Milgram’s original study, where participants were no victims but only agents who were forced to harm. The current study replicates and extends findings from the 2016 study by Caspar et al. in an online meeting setting, where participants served only as agents—similar to the original Milgram studies—while controlling the order of free and forced choice blocks. Substantiating earlier findings, forced choices reduced temporal binding (increased time interval estimations) compared to free choices independent of the order. We briefly discuss the importance of replications of coercion effects on the sense of agency, particularly in online decision-making settings.
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Action selection and simultaneously presented emotional sound and reward: Differential effects on implicit and explicit sense of agency
Article
  • Nov 2024
  • CONSCIOUS COGN
The sense of agency (SoA) refers to the subjective experience of influencing the external world through actions. This study explores how action selection and simultaneous affective outcomes impact implicit and explicit SoA. In two experiments, participants performed free or instructed key presses followed by simultaneously presenting a reward picture (gain, loss) with an emotional sound (positive, neutral, negative). Experiment 1 showed enhanced implicit SoA for free (vs. instructed) actions and positive (vs. negative) sound. Experiment 2 revealed enhanced explicit SoA for reward gain (vs. loss) and positive (vs. negative) sound. Results suggest that SoA formation at different consciousness levels depends on various cues’ absolute and relative strengths. Action selection only influenced implicit SoA, while affective outcomes showed differential effects: emotional sound impacted implicit SoA, and both reward and sound influenced explicit SoA, with motivation-related reward showing stronger effects. This research advances the understanding of cue integration mechanisms underlying SoA formation.
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Evaluating the Bayesian causal inference model of intentional binding through computational modeling
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Intentional binding refers to the subjective compression of the time interval between an action and its consequence. While intentional binding has been widely used as a proxy for the sense of agency, its underlying mechanism has been largely veiled. Bayesian causal inference (BCI) has gained attention as a potential explanation, but currently lacks sufficient empirical support. Thus, this study implemented various computational models to describe the possible mechanisms of intentional binding, fitted them to individual observed data, and quantitatively evaluated their performance. The BCI models successfully isolated the parameters that potentially contributed to intentional binding (i.e., causal belief and temporal prediction) and generally better explained an observer’s time estimation than traditional models such as maximum likelihood estimation. The estimated parameter values suggested that the time compression resulted from an expectation that the actions would immediately cause sensory outcomes. Furthermore, I investigated the algorithm that realized this BCI and found probability-matching to be a plausible candidate; people might heuristically reconstruct event timing depending on causal uncertainty rather than optimally integrating causal and temporal posteriors. The evidence demonstrated the utility of computational modeling to investigate how humans infer the causal and temporal structures of events and individual differences in that process.
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Libet’s Legacy: A Primer to the Neuroscience of Volition
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Effects of free choice and outcome valence on the sense of agency: evidence from measures of intentional binding and feelings of control
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The sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over one’s actions, and, through them, over external events. One proposed marker of implicit sense of agency is ‘intentional binding’—the tendency to perceive voluntary actions and their outcomes as close in time. Another is attenuation of the sensory consequences of a voluntary action. Here we show that the ability to choose an outcome through action selection contributes to implicit sense of agency. We measured intentional binding and stimulus intensity ratings using painful and non-painful somatosensory outcomes. In one condition, participants chose between two actions with different probabilities of producing high or low intensity outcomes, so action choices were meaningful. In another condition, action selection was meaningless with respect to the outcome. Having control over the outcome increased binding, especially when outcomes were painful. Greater sensory attenuation also tended to be associated with stronger binding of the outcome towards the action that produced it. Previous studies have emphasised the link between sense of agency and initiation of voluntary motor actions. Our study shows that the ability to control outcomes by discriminative action selection is another key element of implicit sense of agency. It also investigates, for the first time, the relation between binding and sensory attenuation for the same events.
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One of the hallmarks of human existence is that we all hold beliefs that determine how we act. Amongst such beliefs, the idea that we are endowed with free will appears to be linked to prosocial behaviors, probably by enhancing the feeling of responsibility of individuals over their own actions. However, such effects appear to be more complex that one might have initially thought. Here, we aimed at exploring how induced disbeliefs in free will impact the sense of agency over the consequences of one’s own actions in a paradigm that engages morality. To do so, we asked participants to choose to inflict or to refrain from inflicting an electric choc to another participant in exchange of a small financial benefit. Our results show that participants who were primed with a text defending neural determinism – the idea that humans are a mere bunch of neurons guided by their biology – administered fewer shocks and were less vindictive toward the other participant. Importantly, this finding only held for female participants. These results show the complex interaction between gender, (dis)beliefs in free will and moral behavior.
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How Much Does Emotional Valence of Action Outcomes Affect Temporal Binding?
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Temporal binding refers to the compression of the perceived time interval between voluntary actions and their sensory consequences. Research suggests that the emotional content of an action outcome can modulate the effects of temporal binding. We attempted to conceptually replicate these findings using a time interval estimation task and different emotionally-valenced action outcomes (Experiments 1 and 2) than used in previous research. Contrary to previous findings, we found no evidence that temporal binding was affected by the emotional valence of action outcomes. After validating our stimuli for equivalence of perceived emotional valence and arousal (Experiment 3), in Experiment 4 we directly replicated Yoshie and Haggard’s (2013) original experiment using sound vocalizations as action outcomes and failed to detect a significant effect of emotion on temporal binding. These studies suggest that the emotional valence of action outcomes exerts little influence on temporal binding. The potential implications of these findings are discussed.
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Instrumental Divergence and the Value of Control OPEN
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The effects of freedom of choice in action selection on perceived mental effort and the sense of agency
Article
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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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Choosing, Doing, and Controlling: Implicit Sense of Agency Over Somatosensory Events
Article
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Sense of agency—a feeling of control over one’s actions and their outcomes—might include at least two components: free choice over which outcome to pursue and motoric control over the action causing the outcome. We orthogonally manipulated locus of outcome choice (free or instructed choice) and motoric control (active or passive movement), while measuring the perceived temporal attraction between actions and outcomes (temporal binding) as an implicit marker of agency. Participants also rated stimulus intensity so that we could measure sensory attenuation, another possible implicit marker of agency. Actions caused higher or lower levels of either painful heat or mild electrotactile stimulation. We found that both motoric control and outcome choice contributed to outcome binding. Moreover, free choice, relative to instructed choice, attenuated the perceived magnitude of high-intensity outcomes, but only when participants made an active movement. Thus, choosing, not just doing, influences temporal binding and sensory attenuation, though in different ways. Our results show that these implicit measures of agency are sensitive to both voluntary motor commands and instrumental control over action outcomes.
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