The Effects Of Freedom Of Voluntary Action Selections On Sense Of Agency

Sense of agency(SoA)refers to the feeling of execute actions according to their consciousness and selected goals,so as to controlling one's own actions,and the experience of controlling external events with one's actions,and it's the core factor to construct self-consciousness.Previous studies have shown that voluntary action is an important condition for the generation of sense of agency.Individuals can predict the results according to the action,they will experience a stronger sense of agency as a result of the highly match between the intended and actual result of the action.However,the specific mechanism of the effect of voluntary action components on sense of agency is still unclear.Some researchers divide voluntary action into three components:a component related to the decision about which action to execute(what component),a component related to the decision about when to execute an action(when component),and finally the decision about whether to execute an action or not(whether component).Previous studies have found that sense of agency occurs only under voluntary action.However,there is insufficient evidence to explore the following issues.Firstly,whether there is consistency in the effect of each component of voluntary action on the sense of agency;Secondly,when the external environment provides a variety of choices for action selection,whether there is a change in the sense of agency when lead to the same and different results.Accordingly,this study uses the clock method to explore the influence of the number and time of voluntary action selection on sense of agency and the influence of voluntary action selection on sense of agency under different feedback results.The study included three experiments.Experiment 1 examines the effect of free execution key and prescribed time key on sense of agency.Experiments 2 explored the influence of the degree of freedom of choice of voluntary action on the sense of agency from two aspects.Experiment 2A examines subjects make different numbers of free choices,resulting in the same results,how does the sense of agency change.Experiment 2B is similar to experiment 2A,but resulting in the different results,how does the sense of agency change.Summing up all the results of three experiments,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)When the action occurs,the sense of agency under the time free selection condition is stronger than the time limit selection condition.(2)The number of action choices and the connection between the action and the result have an effect on the sense of agency.As the number of choices increases,the sense of agency is stronger when more results are presented.