3 research outputs found
The feeling of agency: Empirical indicators for a pre-reflective level of action awareness
No full textThe sense of agency has been defined as the sense that I am the author of my own actions. This sense, however, is usually not reflected upon but instead pre-reflectively experienced. Experimental approaches usually measure the sense of agency by judgments or verbal reports, despite evidence that the sense of agency is not sufficiently assessed on such a reflective level. Here we sought to identify non-verbal measures of the sense of agency, particularly testing the relevance of physiological activity such as skin conductance and heart rate. Manipulating the visual feedback to an executed movement, we investigated how well physiological activity and other movement parameters differed between real and false feedback (i.e., between actual agency and non-agency), and how they related to accuracy of agency judgments. Skin conductance and heart rate did not differ between agency and non-agency situations; neither did they inform agency judgments. In contrast, movement onsets—particularly, discrepancies between feedback and movement onsets—were related to agency judgments. Overall, our results indicate weak visceral-somatic associations with the sense of agency. Thus, physiological activity did not prove to be an empirical indicator for the feeling of agency
Specifying social cognitive processes with a social dual-task paradigm
No full textAutomatic imitation tasks measuring motor priming effects showed that we directly map observed actions of other agents onto our own motor repertoire (direct matching). A recent joint-action study using a social dual-task paradigm provided evidence for task monitoring. In the present study, we aimed to test a) if automatic imitation is disturbed during joint action and b) if task monitoring is content or time dependent. We used a social dual task that was made of an automatic imitation task (Person 1: Task 1) and a two-choice number task (Person 2: Task 2). Each participant performed one of the two tasks, which were given with a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), in an individual and a joint condition. We found a regular motor priming effect in individual and joint conditions. Under joint conditions, we replicated the previous finding of an increase of reaction times for Person 2 with decreasing SOA. The latter effect was not related to the specific responses performed by both persons. Further, we did not find evidence for a representation of the other’s specific S-R mappings. Our findings suggest that a) automatic imitation is not disturbed during joint action and b) task monitoring is time dependent
The joint Simon effect depends on perceived agency, but not intentionality, of the alternative action
No full textA co-actor’s intentionality has been suggested to be a key modulating factor for joint action effects like the joint Simon effect (JSE). However, in previous studies intentionality has often been confounded with agency defined as perceiving the initiator of an action as being the causal source of the action. The aim of the present study was to disentangle the role of agency and intentionality as modulating factors of the JSE. In Experiment 1, participants performed a joint go/nogo Simon task next to a co-actor who either intentionally controlled a response button with own finger movements (agency+/intentionality+) or who passively placed the hand on a response button that moved up and down on its own as triggered by computer signals (agency-/intentionality-). In Experiment 2, we included a condition in which participants believed that the co-actor intentionally controlled the response button with a Brain-Computer Interface while placing the response finger clearly besides the response button, so that the causal relationship between agent and action effect was perceptually disrupted (agency-/intentionality+). As a control condition, the response button was computer controlled while the co-actor placed the response finger besides the response button (agency-/intentionality-). We observed a JSE when the co-actor responded intentionally and the causal relationship between co-actor and action effect could be perceived, but not when the co-actor did not respond intentionally and the causal relationship was disrupted (Experiment 1). When the intentionality of the co-actor was maintained but the perception of the causal relationship between co-actor and action effect destroyed, the JSE was absent (Experiment 2). Our findings clearly indicate a vital role of a co-actor’s agency for the JSE and suggest that the ascription of agency is strongly perceptually grounded
