Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sense of Agency (SoA) is a core concept related to our experience as intentional agents in our environment. Explicit and implicit measures have been used to study SoA. Recent findings suggest that the most common implicit measure, namely Temporal Binding (TB), may reflect memory processes rather than SoA. Here, we implemented two TB measures and an explicit measure in a novel goal-directed extended action task to better understand SoA measures. Participants either watched or produced dot movements to a target of choice and then estimated the duration between two tones that played either upon movement completion (TB1, akin to traditional TB studies) or based on the start and end of movements (TB2). Participants reported stronger explicit SoA during active than passive movements. Results from neither TB version aligned with prediction based on TB-accounts as a reflection of SoA. We discuss memory-based and scaling accounts as alternative interpretations for our data.