Let me Take the Wheel: Illusory Control and Sense of Agency

Abstract

Illusory control refers to an effect in games of chance where features associated with skilful situations increase expectancies of success. Past work has operationalized illusory control in terms of subjective ratings or behaviour, with limited consideration of the relationship between these definitions, or the broader construct of agency. This study used a novel card-guessing task in 78 participants to investigate the relationship between subjective and behavioural illusory control. We compared trials in which participants (a) had no opportunity to exercise illusory control, (b) could exercise illusory control for free, or (c) could pay to exercise illusory control. Contingency Judgment and Intentional Binding tasks assessed explicit and implicit sense of agency, respectively. On the card-guessing task, confidence was higher when participants exerted control than in the baseline condition. In a complementary model, participants were more likely to exercise control when their confidence was high, and this effect was accentuated in the pay condition relative to the free condition. Decisions to pay were positively correlated with control ratings on the Contingency Judgment task, but were not significantly related to Intentional Binding. These results establish an association between subjective and behavioural illusory control and locate the construct within the cognitive literature on agency.

Zoned in or zoned out? Investigating immersion in slot machine gambling using mobile eye‐tracking

“…one AOI value equalled 1, and the rest zero). To address this, all non‐zero event‐related eye movement data were converted to 1 and data were analyzed in three fixed‐effects logistic regressions that tested the likelihood that the reels, credit window or win window were fixated‐on during a given phase (additional details in Supporting information, S2).…”

A Reward-Based Framework of Perceived Control

“…Regardless of whether average reward rate or reward prevalence might be a better account for perceived control, outcome-based aspects could constitute an important element contributing to perceived control. One potential caveat of outcome-related processes in perceived control is revealed via contingency judgment tasks where the probabilities of an outcome and the probability of responding may create an ‘illusion of control’ (Orgaz et al, 2013; Tobias-webb et al, 2017). Consistent with the idea that a belief or perception of control is more potent than objective control, an illusion of control basically reflects the subjective judgment that an action-outcome causal relation exists when in fact there is no contingency.…”

The Cue-integrated Sense of Agency – as Operationalized in Experiments – is not a (Multisensory) Perceptual Effect, but is a Judgment Effect

“…Some other non-motor factors that are shown (by the SoA research findings) to influence the explicit 2 SoAwhich can be reinterpreted as the indirect evidence of cue integration theoryare emotion or affect (e.g. Wilke, Synofzik, Lindner, 2012;Barlas and Obhi, 2014;Gentsch and Synofzik, 2014;Gentsch et al, 2015;Chen et al, 2017;Yoshie and Haggard, 2017;Tobias-Webb et al, 2017;Barlas, Hockley, and Obhi, 2018), age (e.g. John Mirowsky, 1995;Ross and Mirowsky, 2002;Cioffi et al, 2017), effort (e.g.…”