Connecting action control and agency: Does action-effect binding affect temporal binding?

The sense of agency, i.e., the notion that we, as agents, are in control of our own actions and can affect our environment by acting, is an integral part of human volition. Recent work has attempted to ground agency in basic mechanisms of human action control. Along these lines, action-effect binding has been shown to affect explicit judgments of agency. Here, we investigate if such action-effect bindings are also related to temporal binding which is often used as an implicit measure of agency. In two experiments, we found evidence for the establishment of short-term action-effect bindings as well as temporal binding effects. However, the two phenomena were not associated with each other. This finding suggests that the relation of action control and agency is not a simple one, and it adds to the evidence in favor of a dissociation between subjective agency and perceptual biases such as temporal binding.

Action-effect binding and agency.

The sense of agency is a pervasive phenomenon that accompanies conscious acting and extends to the consequences of one's actions in the environment. Subjective feelings of agency are typically explained in terms of predictive processes, based on internal forward models inherent to the sensorimotor system, and postdictive processes, i.e., explicit, retrospective judgments by the agent. Only recently, research has begun to elucidate the link between sense of agency and more basic processes of human action control. The present study was conducted in this spirit and explored the relation between short-term action-effect binding and explicit agency judgments. We found evidence for such a link in that the participants' short-term action-effect binding predicted subsequent agency ratings. This offers a new perspective on the sense of agency, providing an additional mechanism (together with predictive and postdictive processes) that may underlie its formation.

The being a patient effect: negative expectations based on group labeling and corresponding treatment affect patient performance.

Patient studies provide insights into mechanisms underlying diseases and thus represent a cornerstone of clinical research. In this study, we report evidence that differences between patients and controls might partly be based on expectations generated by the patients' knowledge of being invited and treated as a patient: the Being a Patient effect (BP effect). This finding extends previous neuropsychological reports on diagnosis threat. Participants with mild allergies were addressed either as patients or control subjects in a clinical study. We measured the impact of this group labeling and corresponding instructions on pain perception and cognitive performance. Our results provide evidence that the BP effect can indeed affect physiological and cognitive measures in clinical settings. Importantly, these effects can lead to systematic overestimation of genuine disease effects and should be taken into account when disease effects are investigated. Finally, we propose strategies to avoid or minimize this critical confound.

Smooth criminal: convicted rule-breakers show reduced cognitive conflict during deliberate rule violations.

Classic findings on conformity and obedience document a strong and automatic drive of human agents to follow any type of rule or social norm. At the same time, most individuals tend to violate rules on occasion, and such deliberate rule violations have recently been shown to yield cognitive conflict for the rule-breaker. These findings indicate persistent difficulty to suppress the rule representation, even though rule violations were studied in a controlled experimental setting with neither gains nor possible sanctions for violators. In the current study, we validate these findings by showing that convicted criminals, i.e., individuals with a history of habitual and severe forms of rule violations, can free themselves from such cognitive conflict in a similarly controlled laboratory task. These findings support an emerging view that aims at understanding rule violations from the perspective of the violating agent rather than from the perspective of outside observer.

Not so harmless anymore: how context impacts the perception and electrocortical processing of neutral faces.

Our first impression of others is highly influenced by their facial appearance. However, the perception and evaluation of faces is not only guided by internal features such as facial expressions, but also highly dependent on contextual information such as secondhand information (verbal descriptions) about the target person. To investigate the time course of contextual influences on cortical face processing, event-related brain potentials were investigated in response to neutral faces, which were preceded by brief verbal descriptions containing cues of affective valence (negative, neutral, positive) and self-reference (self-related vs. other-related). ERP analysis demonstrated that early and late stages of face processing are enhanced by negative and positive as well as self-relevant descriptions, although faces per se did not differ perceptually. Affective ratings of the faces confirmed these findings. Altogether, these results demonstrate for the first time both on an electrocortical and behavioral level how contextual information modifies early visual perception in a top-down manner.

Distracted to a fault: Attention, actions, and time perception.

In the last years, it has become general consensus that actions change our time perception. Performing an action to elicit a specific event seems to lead to a systematic underestimation of the interval between action and effect, a phenomenon termed temporal (or previously intentional) binding. Temporal binding has been closely associated with sense of agency, our perceived control over our actions and our environment, and because of its robust behavioral effects has indeed been widely utilized as an implicit correlate of sense of agency. The most robust and clear temporal binding effects are typically found via Libet clock paradigms. In the present study, we investigate a crucial methodological confound in these paradigms that provides an alternative explanation for temporal binding effects: a redirection of attentional resources in two-event sequences (as in classical operant conditions) versus singular events (as in classical baseline conditions). Our results indicate that binding effects in Libet clock paradigms may be based to a large degree on such attentional processes, irrespective of intention or action-effect sequences. Thus, these findings challenge many of the previously drawn conclusions and interpretations with regard to actions and time perception.

Sense of agency in social hierarchies.

Distributing complex actions across agents is commonplace in human society. The objective efficiency of joint actions comes with critical challenges for the sense of agency of individual agents, complicating an accurate formation of these agents' perceived control over actions and action outcomes. Here we report a new experimental paradigm to investigate sense of agency for supervisors and subordinates in hierarchical settings. Results indicate profound differences in the sense of agency between both roles, while also indicating additional contributions of such situational factors as degrees of freedom, action decision versus action execution, outcome valence, and veto options. We further observed a tight coupling of sense of agency and sense of responsibility, with only weak links to affective responses to the action outcome. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Headlines win elections: Mere exposure to fictitious news media alters voting behavior.

Repeatedly encountering a stimulus biases the observer's affective response and evaluation of the stimuli. Here we provide evidence for a causal link between mere exposure to fictitious news reports and subsequent voting behavior. In four pre-registered online experiments, participants browsed through newspaper webpages and were tacitly exposed to names of fictitious politicians. Exposure predicted voting behavior in a subsequent mock election, with a consistent preference for frequent over infrequent names, except when news items were decidedly negative. Follow-up analyses indicated that mere media presence fuels implicit personality theories regarding a candidate's vigor in political contexts. News outlets should therefore be mindful to cover political candidates as evenly as possible.

Error cancellation.

The human cognitive system houses efficient mechanisms to monitor ongoing actions. Upon detecting an erroneous course of action, these mechanisms are commonly assumed to adjust cognitive processing to mitigate the error's consequences and to prevent future action slips. Here, we demonstrate that error detection has far earlier consequences by feeding back directly onto ongoing motor activity, thus cancelling erroneous movements immediately. We tested this prediction of immediate auto-correction by analysing how the force of correct and erroneous keypress actions evolves over time while controlling for cognitive and biomechanical constraints relating to response time and the peak force of a movement. We conclude that the force profiles are indicative of active cancellation by showing indications of shorter response durations for errors already within the first 100 ms, i.e. between the onset and the peak of the response, a timescale that has previously been related solely to error detection. This effect increased in a late phase of responding, i.e. after response force peaked until its offset, further corroborating that it indeed reflects cancellation efforts instead of consequences of planning or initiating the error.

Never run a changing system: Action-effect contingency shapes prospective agency.

Human action control is highly sensitive to action-effect contingencies in the agent's environment. Here we show that the subjective sense of agency (SoA) contributes to this sensitivity as a subjective counterpart to instrumental action decisions. Participants (N = 556) experienced varying reward probabilities and were prompted to give summary evaluations of their SoA after a series of action-effect episodes. Results first revealed a quadratic relation of contingency and SoA, driven by a disproportionally strong impact of perfect action-effect contingencies. In addition to this strong situational determinant of SoA, we observed small but reliable interindividual differences as a function of gender, assertiveness, and neuroticism that applied especially at imperfect action-effect contingencies. Crucially, SoA not only reflected the reward structure of the environment but was also associated with the agent's future action decisions across situational and personal factors. These findings call for a paradigm shift in research on perceived agency, away from the retrospective assessment of single behavioral episodes and towards a prospective view that draws on statistical regularities of an agent's environment.

To prevent means to know: Explicit but no implicit agency for prevention behavior.

Human agents draw on a variety of explicit and implicit cues to construct a sense of agency for their actions and the effects of these actions on the outside world. Associative mechanisms binding actions to their immediate effects support the evolution of agency for operant actions. However, human agents often also act to prevent a certain event from occurring. Such prevention behavior poses a critical challenge for the sense of agency, as successful prevention inherently revolves around the absence of a perceivable effect. By assessing the psychological microstructure of singular operant and prevention actions we show that this comes with profound consequences: agency for prevention actions is only evident in explicit measures but not in corresponding implicit proxies. These findings attest to an altered action representation in prevention behavior and they support recent proposals to model related processes such as avoidance learning in terms of propositional rather than associative terms.

Something from nothing: Agency for deliberate nonactions.

Several law systems punish nonactions such as failures to render assistance, although it is unknown if people spontaneously experience a sense of authorship for the consequences of their not acting. Here we provide evidence that events caused by deliberate choices not to act can indeed give rise to a vivid sense of agency. In three experiments, participants reported a sense of agency for events following nonactions and, crucially, temporal binding between nonactions and subsequent consequences suggested a sense of agency for nonactions even at an implicit level. These findings indicate that a sense of agency is not confined to overt body movements. At the same time, agency was more pronounced when the same event resulted from an action rather than being the consequence of a nonaction, highlighting the importance of ascribing different degrees of responsibility for the consequences of acting and not acting.

How Stereotypes Affect Pain.

Stereotypes are abundant in everyday life - and whereas their influence on cognitive and motor performance is well documented, a causal role in pain processing is still elusive. Nevertheless, previous studies have implicated gender-related stereotype effects in pain perception as potential mediators partly accounting for sex effects on pain. An influence of stereotypes on pain seems indeed likely as pain measures have proven especially susceptible to expectancy effects such as placebo effects. However, so far empirical approaches to stereotype effects on pain are correlational rather than experimental. In this study, we aimed at documenting gender-related stereotypes on pain perception and processing by actively manipulating the participants' awareness of common stereotypical expectations. We discovered that gender-related stereotypes can significantly modulate pain perception which was mirrored by activity levels in pain-associated brain areas.

My mistake? Enhanced error processing for commanded compared to passively observed actions.

We often ask other people to carry out actions for us in order to reach our goals. However, these commanded actions may sometimes go awry, and goal attainment is hindered by errors of the following person. Here, we investigated how the commanding person processes these errors of their follower. Because such errors indicate that the original goal of the command is not met, error processing for these actions should be enhanced compared to passively observing another person's actions. Participants thus either commanded another agent to perform one of four key press responses or they passively observed the agent responding. The agent could respond correctly or commit an error in either case. We compared error processing of commanded and passively observed actions using observation-related post-error slowing (oPES) as a behavioral marker and observed-error-related negativity (oNE /oERN) and observed-error positivity (oPE ) as electrophysiological markers. Whereas error processing, as measured via the oERN, was similarly pronounced for commanded and observed actions, commanded actions gave rise to stronger oPES and a stronger oPE . These results suggest that enhanced monitoring is an automatic by-product of commanding another person's actions.

Dissociating action-effect activation and effect-based response selection.

Anticipated action effects have been shown to govern action selection and initiation, as described in ideomotor theory, and they have also been demonstrated to determine crosstalk between different tasks in multitasking studies. Such effect-based crosstalk was observed not only in a forward manner (with a first task influencing performance in a following second task) but also in a backward manner (the second task influencing the preceding first task), suggesting that action effect codes can become activated prior to a capacity-limited processing stage often denoted as response selection. The process of effect-based response production, by contrast, has been proposed to be capacity-limited. These observations jointly suggest that effect code activation can occur independently of effect-based response production, though this theoretical implication has not been tested directly at present. We tested this hypothesis by employing a dual-task set-up in which we manipulated the ease of effect-based response production (via response-effect compatibility) in an experimental design that allows for observing forward and backward crosstalk. We observed robust crosstalk effects and response-effect compatibility effects alike, but no interaction between both effects. These results indicate that effect activation can occur in parallel for several tasks, independently of effect-based response production, which is confined to one task at a time.

Do we see it or not? Sensory attenuation in the visual domain.

Sensory consequences of an agent's actions are perceived less intensely than sensory stimuli that are not caused (and thus not predicted) by the observer. This effect of sensory attenuation has been discussed as a key principle of perception, potentially mediating various crucial functions such as agency and the discrimination of self-caused sensory stimulation from stimuli caused by external factors. Precise models describe the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon across a variety of modalities, especially the auditory, tactile, and visual domain. Despite these strong claims, empirical evidence for sensory attenuation in the visual domain is surprisingly sparse and ambiguous. In the present article, the authors therefore aim to clarify the role of sensory attenuation for learned visual action effects. To this end, the authors present a comprehensive replication effort including 3 separate, high-powered experiments on sensory attenuation in the visual domain with 1 direct and 2 preregistered, conceptual replication attempts of an influential study on this topic (Cardoso-Leite et al., 2010). Signal detection analyses were targeted to distinguish between true visual sensitivity and response bias. Contrary to previous assumptions and despite high statistical power, however, the authors found no evidence for sensory attenuation of learned visual action effects. Bayesian analyses further supported the null hypothesis of no effect, thus constraining theories that promote sensory attenuation as an immediate and necessary consequence of voluntary actions. (PsycINFO Database Record

My Command, My Act: Observation Inflation in Face-To-Face Interactions.

When observing another agent performing simple actions, these actions are systematically remembered as one's own after a brief period of time. Such observation inflation has been documented as a robust phenomenon in studies in which participants passively observed videotaped actions. Whether observation inflation also holds for direct, face-to-face interactions is an open question that we addressed in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants commanded the experimenter to carry out certain actions, and they indeed reported false memories of self-performance in a later memory test. The effect size of this inflation effect was similar to passive observation as confirmed by Experiment 2. These findings suggest that observation inflation might affect action memory in a broad range of real-world interactions.

Was it me? - Filling the interval between action and effects increases agency but not sensory attenuation.

Sensory stimuli resulting from one's own actions are perceptually attenuated compared to identical but externally produced stimuli. This may enable the organism to discriminate between self-produced events and externally produced events, suggesting a strong link between sensory attenuation and a subjective sense of agency. To investigate this supposed link, we compared the influence of filled and unfilled action-effect delays on both, judgements of agency for self-produced sounds and attenuation of the event-related potential (ERP). In line with previous findings, judgments of agency differed between both delay conditions with higher ratings for filled than for unfilled delays. Sensory attenuation, however, was not influenced by filling the delay. These findings indicate a partial dissociation of the two phenomena.

Scientific Psychology in the 18th Century: A Historical Rediscovery.

As early as 1783, the almost forgotten philosopher, metaphysicist, and psychologist Ferdinand Ueberwasser (1752-1812) designated himself "Professor für empirische Psychologie und Logik" (professor of empirical psychology and logic) at the University of Münster, Germany. His position was initiated and supported by the minister and educational reformer Franz von Fürstenberg (1729-1810), who considered psychology a core scientific discipline that should be taught at each school and university. At the end of the 18th century, then, psychology seems to have been on the verge of becoming an independent academic discipline, about 100 years before Wilhelm Wundt founded the discipline's first official laboratory. It seems surprising that Ueberwasser's writings-including a seminal textbook on empirical psychology-have been almost entirely overlooked in most historical accounts. We focus on this important founding moment of psychological science and on the circumstances that eventually brought this seminal development to a halt.

Rethinking Explicit Expectations: Connecting Placebos, Social Cognition, and Contextual Perception.

Expectancy effects are a widespread phenomenon, and they come with a lasting influence on cognitive operations, from basic stimulus processing to higher cognitive functions. Their impact is often profound and behaviorally significant, as evidenced by an enormous body of literature investigating the characteristics and possible processes underlying expectancy effects. The literature on this topic spans diverse fields, from clinical psychology to cognitive neuroscience, and from social psychology to behavioral biology. We present an emerging perspective on these diverse phenomena and show how this perspective stimulates new toeholds for investigation, provides insight in underlying mechanisms, improves awareness of methodological confounds, and can lead to a deeper understanding of the effects of expectations on a broad spectrum of cognitive processes.