Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 21, Issue 3, September 2012, Pages 1267-1279
Consciousness and Cognition

The sense of agency during skill learning in individuals and dyads

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.04.001Get rights and content

Abstract

The sense of agency has received much attention in the context of individual action but not in the context of joint action. We investigated how the sense of agency developed during individual and dyadic performance while people learned a haptic coordination task. The sense of agency increased with better performance in all groups. Individuals and dyads showed a differential sense of agency after initial task learning, with dyads showing a minimal increase. The sense of agency depended on the context in which the task was first learnt, as transfer from joint to individual performance resulted in an illusory boost in the sense of agency. Whereas the quality of performance related to the sense of agency, the generated forces to achieve the task did not. Our findings are consistent with a predictive model account at the perceptual level, such that the sense of agency relies most strongly on sharable perceptual information.

Highlights

► We tested theories addressing the sense of agency in a joint action context. ► We compared the sense of agency while performing the same task alone and together with a partner. ► The sense of agency depended on the objective quality of task performance. ► Shared perceptual information was more important than private sensorimotor information. ► Individual actors experienced a heightened sense of agency after performing jointly.

Introduction

People perform an immense variety of actions together with others. For example, they carry heavy objects, play music and team sports, and build houses together. Much research has recently investigated how people plan and coordinate such joint actions. In this article, rather than focusing on the processes that may support successful joint actions, we focus on the experiences actors have when engaging in joint actions. We ask how the experience of being in control (i.e., the sense of agency) develops when people learn a new task alone versus together, and whether the sense of agency differs for individual actions versus joint actions. In addition, we examine how developing a sense of agency individually transfers to sensing agency over joint actions, and vice versa.

The sense of agency has often been studied in tasks that vary along two dimensions; an actor (a) objectively either causes (or is subjected to) or does not cause (or is not subjected to) the action (Haggard and Tsakiris, 2009, Metcalfe and Greene, 2007) while (b) an alternative cause for the action is either present or absent (e.g., Sato, 2009, Sato and Yasuda, 2005). A central question in this approach is under what conditions people experience agency over actions they do not produce themselves, or fail to experience agency over actions they do in fact cause. Additional studies have studied the sense of agency in relation to whether movements are actively or passively generated, and in relation to the timing of the feedback accompanying these movements (e.g., Tsakiris, Longo, & Haggard, 2010).

But how do people experience agency over actions they intentionally produce together with somebody else? Before we delve into this question, it is useful to first consider potential differences between individual and joint actions in terms of requirements on action planning and control. We will then outline the major theoretical frameworks concerning the sense of agency, and extract predictions from them for the sense of agency for joint actions.

Section snippets

Individual actions and joint actions

Successfully performing a joint action requires several processes for action planning and action coordination. Some of these processes are not specific to joint action, but also operate when people perform actions by themselves. For example, regardless of whether people act alone or together, they may form predictions about the expected consequences of their actions. In addition, feedback about the action is available from different modalities in both cases. Processes involved in comparing the

Theories addressing the sense of agency

What are the implications of these differences between individual and joint actions for the sense of agency people experience over these actions? Several theoretical accounts provide a foundation for making predictions about the sense of agency for joint actions (see van der Wel and Knoblich (in press) for a review). These accounts are reminiscent of the historical debate between William James and Wilhelm Wundt on the contributions of central and peripheral sources to the conscious experience

Sense of agency during individual and joint performance of the same task

Before explicating the predictions for joint action that follow from prior accounts of agency, we first discuss what a useful task for studying the sense of agency in individual and joint action would look like. To study agency in individual versus joint actions, a useful situation would be one in which the subjective sense of agency could be studied while the objective performance on a task is similar for individuals and dyads. The reason for this is that it would allow one to make inferences

Predictions

What are the predictions for joint agency versus individual agency that follow from the different theoretical frameworks outlined earlier? Based on the theory of apparent mental causation, the sense of agency should always be weaker during joint actions compared to individual actions because the criterion for exclusivity is never met during joint actions. That is, because a coactor is always present people can never be sure whether they cause (parts of) an action themselves or not. In addition,

Participants

In total, 105 participants (35 males and 70 females between the ages of 18 and 48) took part in this experiment. Fifteen participants exclusively performed the task individually (Individual-Individual (II) group). Another 15 participants performed the first part of the experiment alone, and were then joined by another participant to perform the second part together (Individual-Joint (IJ) group). Another 15 participants performed the first part of the experiment together with one of 15 other

Results

The results are reported in two main sections. In Section 1, we report on the objective performance to evaluate how well individuals and dyads performed, and how well they learned the task over trials. In Section 2, we provide the analyses of the (subjective) agency ratings and their relation to the objective performance and the forces generated during performance.

For each analysis reported here, we applied a Greenhouse-Geisser correction to the degrees of freedom when the assumption of

Discussion

Whereas the sense of agency has been studied for individual (unimanual) actions, how people sense agency over joint actions has to our knowledge not been examined experimentally. As people perform many actions together with others, the question of how others’ actions affect individual experience during joint action seems to address a basic ingredient of human mental life. The aim of the present study was to examine the sense of agency while people acquired a new skill either individually or

Acknowledgments

The research was performed with support from a EURYI grant awarded to Natalie Sebanz. We thank the Instrumentmakerij at Radboud University for building the experimental apparatus, and Anja Barth, Carolin Becker, Hanneke Heldens, and Rene Steinvoort for their help with the data collection.

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