Evaluation of the Effect of Prime Stimulus on Sense of Agency in Stop Operation of the Object in Circular Motion

Abstract

Human cognitive mechanisms have been studied for the design of user-friendly interfaces. One of the key issues is a sense of agency, which is defined as the sense that “I am the one who is causing this action.” The user interface is important; it can alter the feeling of sense of agency. In this research, we focus on a prime stimulus and evaluate the effect thereof by experiments with participants. A ball moves in a circle on a monitor at a constant speed and participants stop it by pushing a key. They were given both prime stimulus and feedback stimulus and indicated if they were the agent who stopped the ball, i.e., they felt a sense of agency. From the results of the experiment, we found that the prime stimulus can have both a positive and negative influence on the sense of agency when human prediction is unreliable.