Physical and mental effort disrupts the implicit sense of agency

Abstract

We investigated the effect of effort on implicit agency ascription for actions performed under varying levels of physical effort or cognitive load. People are able to estimate the interval between two events accurately, but they underestimate the interval between their own actions and their outcomes. This effect is known as 'intentional binding', and may provide feedback regarding the consequences of our actions. Concurrently with the interval reproduction task, our participants pulled sports resistance bands at high and low resistance levels (Experiments 1 and 2), or performed a working memory task with high and low set-sizes (Experiment 3).Intentional binding was greater under low than high effort. When the effort was task-related (Experiment 1), this effect depended on the individual's explicit appraisal of exertion, while the effect of effort was evident at the group level when the effort was task-unrelated (physical, Experiment 2; mental, Experiment 3). These findings imply that the process of intentional binding is compromised when cognitive resources are depleted, either through physical or mental strain. We discuss this notion in relation to the integration of direct sensorimotor feedback with signals of agency and other instances of cognitive resource depletion and action control during strain.Keywords: Sense of agency, temporal binding, intentional binding, experience of effort, time perception. EFFORT DISRUPTS IMPLICIT AGENCY 3 Physical and mental effort disrupts the implicit sense of agencyIt is important that the human motor system can efficiently process events which are the result of its own actions, and to discriminate these from events in the world for which it is not responsible. For instance, if I kick a ball and it knocks over and smashes a vase of flowers, I know my action of kicking the ball was responsible for the vase smashing. Selfauthored events like this tend to be easy to identify and this feeling that 'I did it' is known as a sense of agency. Some actions are more effortful than others; kicking a ball as hard as one can might break a vase, but so might brushing one's arm against it as one walks past it precariously positioned near the edge of a table. Both these actions have the same outcome, but might require the action monitoring system to respond differently in order to correctly ascribe agency. Here, we tested the role of physical and mental effort on the ascription of sense of agency, using an implicit measure.

Losing Control in Social Situations: How the Presence of Others Affects Neural Processes Related to Sense of Agency

“…As such, the precuneus sits at an intersection of context-related and action-related cognitive processes, thus linking social contexts to reduced sense of agency. Thus, according to our model, the presence of a coplayer may have similar effects on sense of agency as increasing working memory load or engaging in dual tasks (Hon et al, 2013; Howard et al, 2016; Wen et al, 2016). …”

“…This effect is related to activity in the left angular gyrus (AG), with enhanced AG activity during action selection being correlated with a reduction in sense of agency in high-conflict trials (Chambon et al, 2013). Similarly, increasing working memory load has been found to reduce sense of agency (Hon et al, 2013; Howard et al, 2016; Wen et al, 2016). …”

Compress global, dilate local: Intentional binding in action–outcome alternations

“…While the time reproduction method used in the present study may provide more accurate measurement than a verbal estimation (Mioni, 2018), which has been used in previous studies on intentional binding (e.g., Engbert et al, 2007), the reproduction of subsecond intervals (around 400 ms in our experiment) may be difficult and too variable given the motor latency required for the reproduction keypresses (van Volkinburg & Balsam, 2014). Furthermore, while intentional binding for a single actionoutcome dyad with temporal interval longer than 500 ms has been reliably detected by the reproduction method (Dewey & Knoblich, 2014;Howard, Edwards, & Bayliss, 2016;Humphreys & Buehner, 2010;Poonian & Cunnington, 2013), there is little evidence on whether the reproduction method can accurately detect the intentional binding with the interval shorter than 500 ms (but see Dewey & Knoblich, 2014). Therefore, we conducted a follow-up Experiment 2 to test whether intentional binding for the subsecond interval of an action-outcome dyad could be detected by the time reproduction method, and whether the biased time perception could be explained merely by the mood changes induced by active and passive movements.…”

Cultural group perception enhances sense of agency in a multicultural society

“…Future research should explore whether we can replicate the patterns in individualistic multicultural societies, such as the United States and Canada. Finally, despite the advantages of implicit measures, some studies showed that the results from implicit and explicit measures of sense of agency may not be highly correlated (Howard, Edwards & Bayliss, 2016). To further examine whether an activated group identity is strong enough to enhance individuals' sense of agency and provide evidence for external validity, future studies should use both explicit and implicit measures to replicate the results across different situations.…”