The sense of agency refers to the feeling of being able to initiate and control events through one's actions. The "intentional binding" effect (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002), refers to a subjective compression of the temporal interval between actions and their effects. The present study examined the influence of action-outcome delays and arousal on both the subjective judgment of agency and the intentional binding effect. In the experiment, participants pressed a key to trigger a central square to jump after various delays. A red central square was used in the high-arousal condition. Results showed that a longer interval between actions and their effects was associated with a lower sense of agency but a stronger intentional binding effect. Furthermore, although arousal enhanced the intentional binding effect, it did not influence the judgment of agency.

The sense of agency refers to the feeling that one is controlling events through one’s own behavior. This study examined how task performance and the delay of events influence one’s sense of agency during continuous action accompanied by a goal. The participants were instructed to direct a moving dot into a square as quickly as possible by pressing the left and right keys on a keyboard to control the direction in which the dot traveled. The interval between the key press and response of the dot (i.e., direction change) was manipulated to vary task difficulty. Moreover, in the assisted condition, the computer ignored participants’ erroneous commands, resulting in improved task performance but a weaker association between the participants’ commands and actual movements of the dot relative to the condition in which all of the participants’ commands were executed (i.e., self-control condition). The results showed that participants’ sense of agency increased with better performance in the assisted condition relative to the self-control condition, even though a large proportion of their commands were not executed. We concluded that, when the action-feedback association was uncertain, cognitive inference was more dominant relative to the process of comparing predicted and perceived information in the judgment of agency.

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This study examined how different components of working memory are involved in spatial knowledge acquisition for good and poor sense-of-direction (SOD) people. We employed a dual-task method, and asked participants to learn routes from videos with verbal, visual and spatial interference tasks and without any interference. Results showed that participants with a good SOD encoded landmarks and routes verbally and spatially, and integrated knowledge about them into survey knowledge with the support of all three components of working memory. In contrast, participants with a poor SOD encoded landmarks only verbally, and tended to rely on the visual component of working memory in the processing of route knowledge. Based on the results, a possible model for explaining the differences in spatial knowledge acquisition and SOD was proposed.

The feeling of control is a fundamental aspect of human experience and accompanies our voluntary actions all the time. However, how the sense of control interacts with wider perception, cognition, and behavior remains poorly understood. This study focused on how controlling an external object influences the allocation of attention. Experiment 1 examined attention to an object that is under a different level of control from the others. Participants searched for a target among multiple distractors on screen. All the distractors were partially under the participant's control (50% control level), and the search target was either under more or less control than the distractors. The results showed that, against this background of partial control, visual attention was attracted to an object only if it was more controlled than other available objects and not if it was less controlled. Experiment 2 examined attention allocation in contexts of either perfect control or no control over most of the objects. Specifically, the distractors were under either perfect (100%) control or no (0%) control, and the search target had one of six levels of control varying from 0% to 100%. When differences in control between the distractors and the target were small, visual attention was now more strongly drawn to search targets that were less controlled than distractors, rather than more controlled, suggesting attention to objects over which one might be losing control. Experiment 3 studied the events of losing or gaining control as opposed to the states of having or not having control. ERP measures showed that P300 amplitude proportionally encoded the magnitude of both increases and decreases in degree of control. However, losing control had more marked effects on P170 and P300 than gaining an equivalent degree of control, indicating high priority for efficiently detecting failures of control. Overall, our results suggest that controlled objects preferentially attract attention in uncontrolled environments. However, once control has been registered, the brain becomes highly sensitive to subsequent loss of control. Our findings point toward careful perceptual monitoring of degree of one's own agentic control over external objects. We suggest that control has intrinsic cognitive value because perceptual systems are organized to detect it and, once it has been acquired, to maintain it.