Ready to go: Higher sense of agency enhances action readiness and reduces response inhibition.

Sense of agency is the subjective feeling of being in control of one's actions and their effects. Many studies have elucidated the cognitive and sensorimotor processes that drive this experience. However, less is known about how sense of agency influences flexible cognitive and motor control. Here, we investigated the effect of sense of agency on subsequent action regulation using a modified Go/No-Go task. In Experiment 1, we modulated participants' sense of agency by varying the occurrence of action outcomes (present vs. absent) both locally on a trial-by-trial basis and globally in terms of the overall probability of action outcomes within a block of trials (high vs. low). Importantly, we investigated how this manipulation influenced participants' responses to subsequent Go, No-Go, or Free-Choice cues. When participants' previous action led to an outcome (i.e., a happy face) compared with no outcome, they responded more accurately and faster to Go cues, reacted less accurately to No-Go cues, as well as made go decisions more frequently and faster to Free-Choice cues. These effects were even stronger when action outcomes occurred more frequently overall in a given block or in several previous trials. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that the effects of action outcome manipulation on subsequent action regulation were independent of the emotional valence of the action outcome (i.e., a happy or an angry face). Our results suggest that a higher sense of agency as induced by the presence of action outcomes enhanced action readiness and suppressed response inhibition. These findings highlight the impact of the control felt on the control used in action regulation, thereby providing new insights into the functional significance of the sense of agency on human behavior.