Yunsoo Yeo¹, Sang Chul Chong¹; ¹Yonsei University

When we interact with objects, we may experience a sense of initiating and controlling certain events. This feeling is referred to as the sense of agency. Previous research has shown that the sense of agency is not determined by a single mechanism, but rather depends on various sources of information. Also, recent studies suggest that it influences our other cognitive processes such as visual attention and memory. In this study, we focused on variance perception as another potential factor that might relate to the sense of agency. Item variance reflects uncertainty and volatility in the environment, both of which are closely linked to the sense of agency. Across three experiments, we tested whether the sense of agency can affect (Experiments 1 and 2) and be affected by (Experiments 2 and 3) perceived variance. In each experiment, participants were asked to move 40 differently colored circles with or without a 1-second delay, which was introduced to reduce the sense of agency. They then reported either perceived variance of the stimuli (Experiments 1), their sense of agency over the stimuli (Experiment 3), or both (Experiment 2). We found that while the sense of agency did not influence perceived variance, item variance had a negative impact on the sense of agency. However, this effect was observed only when participants reported both perceived variance and the sense of agency on each trial (Experiment 2). The effect disappeared when they only reported the sense of agency (Experiment 3), where the variance of the stimuli became task-irrelevant. Altogether, the present study suggests that variance perception can influence the sense of agency in a unidirectional manner, but this effect is modulated by the task-relevance of variance information.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government(MSIT)(RS-2022-NR070542).