Wen Wen, Yamashita Atsushi, Asama Hajime
Department of Precision Engineering, The University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2016 Jan 28;7:35. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00035. eCollection 2016.
Sense of agency refers to the subjective feeling of controlling events through one's behavior or will. Sense of agency results from matching predictions of one's own actions with actual feedback regarding the action. Furthermore, when an action involves a cued goal, performance-based inference contributes to sense of agency. That is, if people achieve their goal, they would believe themselves to be in control. Previous studies have shown that both action-effect comparison and performance-based inference contribute to sense of agency; however, the dominance of one process over the other may shift based on task conditions such as the presence or absence of specific goals. In this study, we examined the influence of divided attention on these two processes underlying sense of agency in two conditions. In the experimental task, participants continuously controlled a moving dot for 10 s while maintaining a string of three or seven digits in working memory. We found that when there was no cued goal (no-cued-goal condition), sense of agency was impaired by high cognitive load. Contrastingly, when participants controlled the dot based on a cued goal (cued-goal-directed condition), their sense of agency was lower than in the no-cued-goal condition and was not affected by cognitive load. The results suggest that the action-effect comparison process underlying sense of agency requires attention. On the other hand, the weaker influence of divided attention in the cued-goal-directed condition could be attributed to the dominance of performance-based inference, which is probably automatic.
行动感是指通过自身行为或意志控制事件的主观感受。行动感源于将对自身行动的预测与关于该行动的实际反馈进行匹配。此外，当一个行动涉及到提示目标时，基于表现的推断会对行动感产生影响。也就是说，如果人们实现了目标，他们就会相信自己处于掌控之中。先前的研究表明，行动-效果比较和基于表现的推断都对行动感有影响；然而，一个过程相对于另一个过程的主导地位可能会根据任务条件（如是否存在特定目标）而发生变化。在本研究中，我们在两种条件下考察了注意力分散对构成行动感的这两个过程的影响。在实验任务中，参与者持续控制一个移动的点10秒，同时在工作记忆中保持一串三位数或七位数。我们发现，当没有提示目标时（无提示目标条件），高认知负荷会损害行动感。相反，当参与者基于提示目标控制该点时（提示目标导向条件），他们的行动感低于无提示目标条件，且不受认知负荷影响。结果表明，构成行动感的行动-效果比较过程需要注意力。另一方面，在提示目标导向条件下注意力分散的影响较弱，这可能归因于基于表现的推断占主导地位，而这种推断可能是自动的。
