What am I doing? It depends: agency and action identification

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Motor Control

Background:

• Actions can be described at various levels, from abstract goals to concrete movements.
• Understanding how action identification influences the subjective experience of agency is crucial for explaining human behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between the level of action identification and the sense of agency.
• To examine how manipulating lower-level (movement) and higher-level (outcome) task difficulty affects agency and performance.

Main Methods:

• A hierarchical typing task was designed where participants memorized and reported letter sequences.
• Lower-level difficulty was manipulated by target size (aiming), and higher-level difficulty by sequence type (memory).
• Participants' sense of agency and performance were recorded under different difficulty conditions.

Main Results:

• Both higher-level (memory) and lower-level (aiming) task difficulties significantly impacted participants' sense of agency.
• Action identification levels were also affected by the manipulated difficulties.
• Interactive effects between higher- and lower-level difficulties were observed on overall performance.

Conclusions:

• The findings contribute to the understanding of agency by demonstrating the influence of action identification levels.
• The study highlights how task difficulty at different hierarchical levels modulates the experience of control.
• Results offer insights into human-computer interaction and motor control, with some divergence from prior action identification research.