Judgments of agency are affected by sensory noise without recruiting metacognitive processing

Abstract
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Abstract

Acting in the world is accompanied by a sense of agency, or experience of control over our actions and their outcomes. As humans, we can report on this experience through judgments of agency. These judgments often occur under noisy conditions. We examined the computations underlying judgments of agency, in particular under the influence of sensory noise. Building on previous literature, we studied whether judgments of agency incorporate uncertainty in the same way that confidence judgments do, which would imply that the former share computational mechanisms with metacognitive judgments. In two tasks, participants rated agency, or confidence in a decision about their agency, over a virtual hand that tracked their movements, either synchronously or with a delay and either under high or low noise. We compared the predictions of two computational models to participants' ratings and found that agency ratings, unlike confidence, were best explained by a model involving no estimates of sensory noise. We propose that agency judgments reflect first-order measures of the internal signal, without involving metacognitive computations, challenging the assumed link between the two cognitive processes.

Data availability

Raw data is publicly available under https://gitlab.com/MarikaConstant/metaAgency.

Article and author information

Author details

Marika Constant

Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

For correspondence
marika.constant@gmail.com

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3756-0362
Roy Salomon

Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6688-617X
Elisa Filevich

Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1158-8220

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (337619223 / RTG2386)

Marika Constant

Volkswagen Foundation (91620)

Marika Constant
Elisa Filevich

Israeli Science Foundation (ISF 1169/17)

Roy Salomon

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: Subjects gave signed, informed consent before starting the experiment. The ethics committee of the Institute of Psychology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin approved the study (Nr. 2020-29), which conformed to the Declaration of Helsinki.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.