INVESTIGATING THE EFFECT OF SENSE OF AGENCY ON MEMORY

Abstract

The sense of agency is the sensation that one has of being in control when undertaking a voluntary action. Previous work demonstrating a memory enhancement resulting from a strong sense of agency inadvertently made a strong sense of agency highly salient in its research design. Thus, it is unclear if the aforementioned memory effect is due to salience or the sense of agency itself. The current study hypothesizes that the memory enhancement effect will continue to emerge when strong sense of agency is no longer salient. Participants were asked to make agency judgments on the movement of a stimulus after making self-directed key presses. Crucially, high agency conditions were made highly frequent and thus less salient relative to low agency conditions. Participants were then administered a recognition test for stimuli seen in the agency judgment task. It was found that when sense of agency was made salient, a weak sense of agency was sufficient to produce a memory effect. The current study thus clarifies the circumstances under which the sense of agency affects memory and adds to existing knowledge of the cognitive consequences of having a sense of agency.