Abstract
Previous research indicates that people can infer self-agency, the experience of causing outcomes as a result of one's own actions, in situations where information about action-outcomes is pre-activated through goal-setting or priming. We argue that goal-based agency inferences rely on attentional control that processes information about matches and mismatches between intended and actual outcomes. Prime-based inferences follow an automatic cognitive accessibility process that relies on matches between primed and actual information about outcomes. We tested an improved task for a better examination of goal-based vs. primed-based agency inferences, and examined the moderating effect of working memory load on both types of inferences. Findings of four studies showed that goal-based, but not prime-based agency inferences dwindled under working memory load. These findings suggest that goal-based (vs. primed-based) agency inferences indeed rely on attentional control, thus rendering goal-based agency inferences especially prone to conditions that modulate goal-directed control processes.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 38-49 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Consciousness and Cognition |
| Volume | 38 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 15 Dec 2015 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The work in this paper was financially supported by VIDI-grant 452-11-014 of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research . We thank Jair K. Shankar for assistance in Experiments 2 and 3.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Inc.