Attentional selection is biased towards controllable stimuli

Self-ownership, not self-production, modulates bias and agency over a synthesised voice

Voices are fundamentally social stimuli, and their importance to the self may be underpinned by how far they can be used to express the self and achieve communicative goals. This paper examines how self-bias and agency over a synthesised voice is altered when that voice is used to represent the self in social interaction. To enable participants to use a new voice, a novel two-player game was created, in which participants communicated online using a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesised voice. We then measured self-bias and sense of agency attributed to this synthesised voice, comparing participants who had used their new voice to interact with another person (n = 44) to a control group of participants (n = 44) who had been only briefly exposed to the voices. We predicted that the new, synthesised self-voice would be more perceptually prioritised after it had been self-produced. Further, that participants' sense of agency over the voice would be increased, if they had experienced self-producing the voice, relative to those who only owned it. Contrary to the hypothesis, the results indicated that both experimental participants and control participants similarly prioritised the new synthesised voice and experienced a similar degree of agency over it, relative to voices owned by others. Critically then, being able to produce the new voice in a social interaction did not modulate bias towards it nor participant's sense of agency over it. These results suggest that merely having ownership over a new voice may be sufficient to generate a perceptual bias and a sense of agency over it.

Agency effects on the binding of event elements in episodic memory

Representing events in episodic memory in a coherent manner requires that their constituent elements are bound together. So far, only few moderators of these binding processes have been identified. Here we investigate whether the presence of an agentic element in an event facilitates binding. The results from six experiments provided no evidence for a facilitating effect of agency on the binding of event elements. In addition, binding effects were only found when event elements were presented simultaneously, but not when they were presented sequentially pairwise, contrary to previous findings. The results suggest that the presence of an agentic element in an event does not, or only to a very limited extent, contribute to the formation of coherent memory representations and that additional processes may be required when binding event elements across temporarily divided encoding episodes. These findings add to a growing body of research regarding moderators and processes relevant for the binding of event elements in episodic memory. Explanations of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Option similarity modulates the link between choice and memory

Choices made in everyday life are highly variable. Sometimes, you may find yourself choosing between two similar options (e.g., breakfast foods to eat) and other times between two dissimilar options (e.g., what to buy with a gift certificate). The goal of the present study was to understand how the similarity of choice options affects our ability to remember what we choose and what we did not choose. We hypothesized that choosing between similar as compared to dissimilar options would evoke a comparison-based strategy (evaluating options with respect to one another), fostering a relational form of encoding and leading to better memory for both the chosen and unchosen options. In Experiment 1, participants reported their strategy when choosing between pairs of similar or dissimilar options, revealing that participants were more likely to use a comparison-based strategy when faced with similar options. In Experiment 2, we tested memory after participants made choices between similar or dissimilar options, finding improved memory for both chosen and unchosen options from the similar compared to dissimilar choice trials. In Experiment 3, we examined strategy use when choosing between pairs of similar or dissimilar options and memory for these options. Replicating and extending the results of the first two experiments, we found that participants were more likely to use a comparison-based strategy when choosing between similar than dissimilar options, and that the positive effect of similarity on memory was stronger for unchosen than chosen options when controlling for strategy use. We interpret our results as evidence that option similarity impacts the mnemonic processes used during choice, altering what we encode and ultimately remember about our choices.

Better Controlled, Better Maintained: Sense of Agency Facilitates Working Memory

The cognitive effects of sense of agency (SoA) attract increasing attention. It is unclear how SoA influences working memory (WM). In the present study, participants first moved several boxes. One of the boxes was more or less controllable than the majority. After boxes stopped moving, to-be-remembered items appeared. Memory performance and SoA over them were subsequently tested. In Experiments 1a and 1b, the majority of boxes, serving as context, were under low and high control respectively. To further examine whether the maintenance stage was influenced, the effect of selective encoding was minimized in Experiments 2a and 2b. Experiment 2b further eliminated the impact of agency judgments and tested the relationship among SoA, WM, and preference. Memory was better for items with strong SoA in the high and low control contexts. The effect partly stems from the modulation of the maintenance stage in WM, in which reward-based processes could be engaged.

Sense of agency may not improve recollection and familiarity in recognition memory

Sense of agency (SoA) is a feeling of controlling one's own action. Recognition memory can improve for stimuli that involve SoA perhaps because of the self-reference effect. Recognition memory consists of recollection (i.e., detailed memory of stimuli) and familiarity (i.e., a feeling that stimuli are in memory). The self-reference effect is often observed in the recollection. Here, we investigated whether SoA particularly improves the recollection process. Participants pressed a key to produce an outcome (i.e., box movement followed by word presentation in Experiment 1 or word presentation in Experiment 2) and rated their SoA over the outcome. The outcome was spatially congruent or incongruent with the action. The participants learned the words intentionally (Experiment 1) or incidentally (Experiment 2). Performances of recollection and familiarity were assessed using the remember/know procedure. Our results suggest that the participants' SoA was successfully manipulated. However, contrary to our hypothesis and previous findings, we found no effects of voluntary action and action-outcome congruence on recollection and familiarity processes of recognition memory, regardless of the latency of word presentation and learning strategies. Further studies are needed to replicate and elucidate the relationship between the SoA and recognition memory.

Task-irrelevant object response to action enhances the sense of agency for controlling the object in automation

The sense of agency (SoA) refers to the experience of controlling our bodies and tools. Recent automated systems require the operators to have less manual control, which decreases the SoA. This study investigated how to increase the SoA when operating automated systems, by focusing on the effect of an object's responses to operators' actions on the SoA. Participants applied brakes to a moving black circle by pressing a key, in order to stop the circle near a goal. Then, they estimated their SoA for stopping the circle. We informed them that there were automatic control trials in which the circle stopped independently of their keypress (86% of the trials). The circle's color briefly changed to white (i.e., flashed) when they pressed the key in a half of the automatic control trials. The SoA was higher with the flash than without it. However, the SoA neither increased when the circle flashed independently of a keypress nor when another object flashed due to a keypress. Furthermore, the keypress contingent object-flash did not influence the SoA when the participants controlled the circle manually. These results indicated that spatiotemporally contingent object responses to actions can enhance the SoA in automatic control situations.

Interactions among endogenous, exogenous, and agency-driven attentional selection mechanisms in interactive displays

Attentional selection is driven, in part, by a complex interplay between endogenous and exogenous cues. Recently, one's interactions with the physical world have also been shown to bias attention. Specifically, the sense of agency that arises when our actions cause predictable outcomes biases our attention toward those things which we control. We investigated how this agency-driven attentional bias interacts with simultaneously presented endogenous (words) and exogenous (color singletons) environmental cues. Participants controlled the movement of one object while others moved independently. In a subsequent search task, targets were either the previously controlled objects or not. Targets were also validly or invalidly cued. Both cue types influenced attention allocation. Endogenous cues and agency-driven attentional selection were independent and additive, indicating they are separable mechanisms of selection. In contrast, exogenous cues eliminated the effects of agency, indicating that perceptually salient environmental cues can override internally derived effects of agency. This is the first demonstration of a boundary condition on agency-driven selection.

Having a sense of agency can improve memory

In most situations, we are able to tell those outcomes we cause from those we do not. By now, research has provided us with a reasonably good understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie this sense of agency - it is thought to be produced by a comparison between a prediction of the outcome and the actual outcome that occurs. What is less clear is whether having a sense of agency can, itself, influence cognition. In the current study, we examined the possibility that sense of agency can affect memory, and we report evidence that stimuli that one feels a sense of agency over are, in fact, better remembered than counterparts without this. This self-agency effect can be distinguished from previously described control-related memory enhancements and adds to what we know of the cognitive consequences of having a sense of agency.