The sense of agency is a core element of self-experiences and is defined as the feeling of oneself being the ‘initiator’ of an action. It is thought to depend on an implicit coupling of action-outcome predictions and the sensory perception of the action. This concept is well-studied in the motor-domain, but less is known about agency during social interactions. It is clear that a sense of agency also occurs when we perform a social action (e. g. looking at someone’s eyes) and receiving feedback by another person (e. g. returning eye-contact). Here, we will refer to the experience of agency within a social interaction as the sense of social agency. The main aim of this article is to first, describe the concept of social agency and second review how virtual reality can help to simulate social interactions in order to systematically study self-experiences and social agency. Gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigms represent a powerful tool in this endeavour, while we emphasise the importance of implementing ecologically valid, interactive stimuli. We furthermore propose a computational approach that can be useful to analyse such data based on the concept of predictive processing. Finally, we highlight the clinical relevance of this account and suggest how this approach can be helpful in providing a mechanistic description of social impairments across various psychiatric disorders. With this article, we attempt to review previous experimental work, suggest new methodological procedures and encourage future empirical research in the field.
Sense of agency describes the experience of being the cause of one's own actions and the resulting effects. In a social interaction, one's actions may also have a perceivable effect on the actions of others. In this article, we refer to the experience of being responsible for the behavior of others as social agency, which has important implications for the success or failure of social interactions. Gaze-contingent eyetracking paradigms provide a useful tool to analyze social agency in an experimentally controlled manner, but the current methods are lacking in terms of their ecological validity. We applied this technique in a novel task using video stimuli of real gaze behavior to simulate a gaze-based social interaction. This enabled us to create the impression of a live interaction with another person while being able to manipulate the gaze contingency and congruency shown by the simulated interaction partner in a continuous manner. Behavioral data demonstrated that participants believed they were interacting with a real person and that systematic changes in the responsiveness of the simulated partner modulated the experience of social agency. More specifically, gaze contingency (temporal relatedness) and gaze congruency (gaze direction relative to the participant's gaze) influenced the explicit sense of being responsible for the behavior of the other. In general, our study introduces a new naturalistic task to simulate gaze-based social interactions and demonstrates that it is suitable to studying the explicit experience of social agency.
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