Judgments of agency are affected by sensory noise without recruiting metacognitive processing
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
- Bar-Ilan University, Israel
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
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.
Reviewing Editor
- Valentin Wyart, École normale supérieure, PSL University, INSERM, France
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.
Version history
- Preprint posted: April 29, 2021 (view preprint)
- Received: July 20, 2021
- Accepted: January 19, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: January 20, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 7, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2022, Constant et al.
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.
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Judgments of agency are affected by sensory noise without recruiting metacognitive processing
eLife 11:e72356.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72356
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