From an early age, most children choose to play with toys typed to their own gender. In order to identify variables that predict toy preference, we conducted a meta‐analysis of observational studies of the free selection of toys by boys and girls aged between 1 and 8 years. From an initial pool of 1788 papers, 16 studies (787 boys and 813 girls) met our inclusion criteria. We found that boys played with male‐typed toys more than girls did (Cohen's d = 1.03, p < .0001) and girls played with female‐typed toys more than boys did (Cohen's d = −0.91, p < .0001). Meta‐regression showed no significant effect of presence of an adult, study context, geographical location of the study, publication date, child's age, or the inclusion of gender‐neutral toys. However, further analysis of data for boys and girls separately revealed that older boys played more with male‐typed toys relative to female‐typed toys than did younger boys (β = .68, p < .0001). Additionally, an effect of the length of time since study publication was found: girls played more with female‐typed toys in earlier studies than in later studies (β = .70, p < .0001), whereas boys played more with male‐typed toys (β = .46, p < .05) in earlier studies than in more recent studies. Boys also played with male‐typed toys less when observed in the home than in a laboratory (β = −.46, p < .05). Findings are discussed in terms of possible contributions of environmental influences and age‐related changes in boys' and girls' toy preferences. Highlights Gender differences in toy choice exist and appear to be the product of both innate and social forces. Despite methodological variation in the choice and number of toys offered, context of testing, and age of child, the consistency in finding sex differences in children's preferences for toys typed to their own gender indicates the strength of this phenomenon and the likelihood that has a biological origin. The time playing with male‐typed toys increased as boys got older, but the same pattern was not found in girls; this indicates that stereotypical social effects may persist longer for boys or that there is a stronger biological predisposition for certain play styles in boys.

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.

Two recent studies have demonstrated that increases in arousal states lead to an increase people’s sense of agency, i.e., the subjective experience of controlling one’s own voluntary actions (Minohara et al. in Front Psychol 7:1165, 2016; Wen et al. in Conscious Cogn 36:87–95, 2015). We here extend these findings by showing that arousal states with negative emotional valence, such as fear and anger, decrease sense of agency. Anger and fear are negative emotional states. Anecdotally, they are often invoked as reasons for losing control, and neuroscientific evidence confirms important effects on the brain’s action control systems. Surprisingly, the subjective experience of acting in anger or fear has scarcely been investigated experimentally. Thus, the legal notion that these intense emotions may undermine normal voluntary control over actions and outcomes (the ‘Loss of Control’, a partial defence for murder) lacks any clear evidence base. In three laboratory experiments, we measured sense of agency using an implicit measure based on time perception (the “intentional binding” paradigm). These actions occurred in either an emotionally neutral condition, or in a fearful (experiments 1 and 2) or angry state (experiment 3). In line with our hypotheses, fear or anger reduced the subjective sense of control over an action outcome, even though the objective causal link between action and outcome remained the same. This gap between the objective facts of agency, and a reduced subjective experience of agency under emotional conditions, has important implications for society and law. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00221-018-5461-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The sense of agency refers to the feeling that we control our actions and, through them, effects in the outside world. Reinforcement learning provides an important theoretical framework for understanding why people choose to make particular actions. Few previous studies have considered how reinforcement and learning might influence the subjective experience of agency over actions and outcomes. In two experiments, participants chose between two action alternatives, which differed in reward probability. Occasional reversals of action-reward mapping required participants to monitor outcomes and adjust action selection processing accordingly. We measured shifts in the perceived times of actions and subsequent outcomes ('intentional binding') as an implicit proxy for sense of agency. In the first experiment, negative outcomes showed stronger binding towards the preceding action, compared to positive outcomes. Furthermore, negative outcomes were followed by increased binding of actions towards their outcome on the following trial. Experiment 2 replicated this post-error boost in action binding and showed that it only occurred when people could learn from their errors to improve action choices. We modelled the post-error boost using an established quantitative model of reinforcement learning. The post-error boost in action binding correlated positively with participants' tendency to learn more from negative outcomes than from positive outcomes. Our results suggest a novel relation between sense of agency and reinforcement learning, in which sense of agency is increased when negative outcomes trigger adaptive changes in subsequent action selection processing.

DLPFC may contribute to sense of agency when participants selected between multiple actions. This enhanced feeling of control over voluntary actions could be related to the observed therapeutic effects of frontal tDCS in depression.

We investigated how the emotional valence of an action outcome influences the experience of control, in an intentional binding experiment. Voluntary actions were followed by emotionally positive or negative human vocalisations, or by neutral tones. We used mental chronometry to measure a retrospective component of sense of agency (SoA), triggered by the occurrence of the action outcome, and a prospective component, driven by the expectation that the outcome will occur. Positive outcomes enhanced the retrospective component of SoA, but only when both occurrence and the valence of the outcome were unexpected. When the valence of outcomes was blocked - and therefore predictable - we found a prospective component of SoA when neutral tones were expected but did not actually occur. This prospective binding was absent, and reversed, for positive and negative expected outcomes. Emotional expectation counteracts the prospective component of SoA, suggesting a distancing effect.

The most popular tasks with which to investigate the perception of subjective synchrony are the temporal order judgment (TOJ) and the simultaneity judgment (SJ). Here, we discuss a complementary approach—a dual-presentation (2x) SJ task—and focus on appropriate analysis methods for a theoretically desirable “roving” design. Two stimulus pairs are presented on each trial and the observer must select the most synchronous. To demonstrate this approach, in Experiment 1 we tested the 2xSJ task alongside TOJ, SJ, and simple reaction-time (RT) tasks using audiovisual stimuli. We interpret responses from each task using detection-theoretic models, which assume variable arrival times for sensory signals at critical brain structures for timing perception. All tasks provide similar estimates of the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) on average, and PSS estimates from some tasks were correlated on an individual basis. The 2xSJ task produced lower and more stable estimates of model-based (and thus comparable) sensory/decision noise than the TOJ. In Experiment 2 we obtained similar results using RT, TOJ, ternary, and 2xSJ tasks for all combinations of auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli. In Experiment 3 we investigated attentional prior entry, using both TOJs and 2xSJs. We found that estimates of prior-entry magnitude correlated across these tasks. Overall, our study establishes the practicality of the roving dual-presentation SJ task, but also illustrates the additional complexity of the procedure. We consider ways in which this task might complement more traditional procedures, particularly when it is important to estimate both PSS and sensory/decisional noise.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractMany everyday activities require time-pressured sensorimotor decision making.Traditionally, perception, decision and action processes were considered to occur in series, but this idea has been successfully challenged, particularly by neurophysiological work in animals. However, the generality of parallel processing requires further elucidation. Here, we investigate whether the accumulation of a decision can be observed intrahemispherically within human motor cortex. Participants categorised faces as male or female, with task difficulty manipulated using morphed stimuli. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, applied during the reaction-time interval, produced motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in two hand muscles that were the major contributors when generating the required pinch/grip movements. Smoothing MEPs using a Gaussian kernel allowed us to recover a continuous time-varying MEP average, comparable to an EEG component, permitting precise localisation of the time at which the motor plan for the responding muscle became dominant.We demonstrate decision-related activity in the motor cortex during this perceptual discrimination task, suggesting ongoing evidence accumulation within the motor system even for two independent actions represented within one hemisphere.