Abstract
Motor control relies on the judgment of which object is under control, known as the sense of agency; however, the mechanisms underlying these processes have been studied independently. Previous agency research required retrospective judgments about whether an event was self-generated, thus failing to capture the sense of agency during motor tasks. In this study, to investigate changes and roles of the sense of agency during motor control tasks, participants were presented with both a true cursor they controlled and a false cursor automatically controlled by a computer. Participants were required to approach a target while discerning which cursor was under their control. Here, by modeling the movements expected to be executed when participants identified a particular cursor as their own and fitting them to actual movement trajectories, the sense of agency was estimated. Consequently, successful quantification of online sense of agency and evidence for agency-driven motor control mechanisms were obtained.
