Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A large literature has demonstrated an abnormal sense ofagency (SOA) in schizophrenic individuals. One limitation ofsuch studies is that they focus exclusively on cognitive orperceptual judgments, thus failing to address affective aspectsof SOA. In our recent work, we have used instrumentaldivergence – the distance between outcome probabilitydistributions associated with available actions – as a formalmeasure of agency, demonstrating an influence of this noveldecision variable on behavioral choice preferences andassociated neural computations in neurotypical adults. Here,we show that the preference for high instrumental divergence(i.e., for high-agency environments) is significantlymodulated by individual differences in positive and negativeschizotypy dimensions. Implications for future assessmentsof clinical populations are discussed.