Sense of agency

Move your hand and a dot moves on a screen. It can feel as though you are causing its movement. But when several dots move, which one is yours to control? How does the brain combine what you expected with the patterns you actually observe to produce the feeling that an outcome was caused by you?[1] [2]

When several dots move after your hand moves, choosing which one you control can involve both an expected consequence and a relationship discovered through exploration. How does the brain weight these sources of information to make an outcome feel caused by you? Prospective cues are available before the outcome, such as an expectation; retrospective cues become available from what happened. In one 2025 experiment, participants adapted to rotated cursor feedback and then explored which dot they felt they controlled among several alternatives. A separate stimulation study used intentional binding: people judged the timing of an action or its consequence, whose perceived times can shift toward each other. This timing measure is an indirect indicator, distinct from explicitly reporting authorship or detecting control.[1] [2]

Predictions and observed patterns both matter. How they combine depends on the situation and measure.[1] [2]

The 2025 stimulation study manipulates intentional binding; the December exploration study finds no significant adaptation effect on control detection. These results do not establish that prediction is irrelevant to agency generally.[1] [2]

In an unfamiliar screen task, finding the dot that responds consistently to your hand can guide which movement you try next. This connects control with learning how your actions affect a new setting. Feeling responsible for an event need not mean having reliable control over it: understanding that difference helps explain when a feeling of authorship is informative and when it may mislead.[1] [2]

Discovering how a new environment responds to your actions can guide what you try next. In the dot task, identifying a consistent movement–outcome relationship provides a basis for choosing further movements. Explaining how such discovery relates to felt authorship would connect learning to influence events with the experience of being their cause. An experiment can change a timing judgment without establishing the same change in a person's belief that they caused an event. Conversely, choosing a controllable dot tests a useful action–outcome relationship without measuring every aspect of felt authorship. These measures capture different parts of the action-and-experience problem; the exploratory null and stimulation results do not yet give one general account.[1] [2]