Integration of multiple cues in judgments of agency

The sense of self-agency is the sense that "I am the one" causing an action. Previous studies showed that multiple cues (such as congruency between prediction and actual effects, and conceptual congruency between preview and effects) contributed to explicit judgments of agency. This study independently manipulated these cues to investigate how such multiple cues of agency are integrated to form an attribution of agency. The results showed that when action became a reliably predictive cue of the occurrence of the outcome through preceding learning trials, then the congruency between prediction and actual effects received a higher weighting for a judgment of agency, and conceptual congruency received a relatively lower weighting. In contrast, without a prior learning session, the conceptual congruency, instead of the congruency between prediction and actual effects, received a relatively higher weighting for a judgment of agency. These results support the optimal cue integration hypothesis that the sense of agency reflects the relative reliability of the respective agency cues in a given situation.