THE EFFECTS OF ATTENTION CAPTURE ON SENSE OF AGENCY

Abstract

Sense of agency (SoA) refers to our ability to attribute actions and their effects to the agent that caused it. The literature posits that SoA is the product of a comparison between a predicted outcome and the actual outcome that occurs. A conversion process would then be required to translate this feeling of agency into a behavioural output such as an agency judgment. Here, we investigated whether this conversion process is dependent on attention by exploring the effects of an attention capture on agency judgments. The results revealed that attention capture led to an increase in the time taken for individuals to provide their agency ratings, but it did not affect the agency ratings themselves. This suggest that the process conversion between the feeling of agency into a rating is indeed dependent on attention. When attentional resources are directed away from the conversion, the process is put to a brief halt until attention is re-directed back to it. The quality of the conversion however, was not affected by the attention capture. Future directions are also discussed.