Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The Sense of Agency (SoA) is a crucial component of robust human motor control and learning. To study the SoA, existing work has largely focussed on retrospective ratings about the level of perceived control over a single visible object. Here we propose a new design, using queries during a trial, for assessing participants' attribution of control to one of multiple acting objects performing the same obstacle avoidance task. Correlation analyses between the controlled object and the object to which Agency was (wrongly) attributed showed that Agency confusion is largely driven by similarities in the dynamics of participants' control input and the confounding object's behaviour. Visual attention was also more attracted to the object believed to be under the participants' control. These results are consistent with the comparator and cue-integration models of Agency and the presented approach opens up novel avenues to explore the dynamic processes underlying the SoA.