A Sense of Urgency on the Sense of Agency: Challenges in Evaluating Agency and Embodiment in Virtual Reality

You, Christopher; Venkatakrishnan, Roshan; Venkatakrishnan, Rohith; Han, Zhuoming; Lok, Benjamin; Peck, Tabitha

doi:10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456139

While judgments of agency were once construed as metacognitive in nature, recent experimental and computational work has shown that agency judgments do not (always) depend on metacognitive resources (Constant et al., 2022; Wen et al., 2023). This development has left the role of metacognitive in generating the subjective experience of agency largely uncharacterized. We measured psychometric thresholds (i.e. first order sensitivity) and metacognitive sensitives for sensorimotor agency judgments, as well as high-level beliefs about one’s agency using an established scale. We found, among a large (n=195) sample, that the relationship between subjects’ moment-by-moment judgments of control and their high-level beliefs was almost entirely mediated by metacognitive access, revealing a novel role of metacognition in linking experiences of agency with the belief of being an agent.

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