Whose Touch is This? : Understanding the Agency Trade-Off Between User-Driven Touch vs. Computer-Driven Touch

Force-feedback enhances digital touch by enabling users to share non-verbal aspects such as rhythm, poses, and so on. To achieve this, interfaces actuate the user’s to touch involuntarily (using exoskeletons or electrical-muscle-stimulation); we refer to this as computer-driven touch. Unfortunately, forcing users to touch causes a loss of their sense of agency. While researchers found that delaying the timing of computer-driven touch preserves agency, they only considered the naïve case when user-driven touch is aligned with computer-driven touch. We argue this is unlikely as it assumes we can perfectly predict user-touches. But, what about all the remainder situations: when the haptics forces the user into an outcome they did not intend or assists the user in an outcome they would not achieve alone? We unveil, via an experiment, what happens in these novel situations. From our findings, we synthesize a framework that enables researchers of digital-touch systems to trade-off between haptic-assistance vs. sense-of-agency.

“Mine Works Better”: Examining the Influence of Embodiment in Virtual Reality on the Sense of Agency During a Binary Motor Imagery Task With a Brain-Computer Interface

Motor imagery-based brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCI) have been proposed as a means for stroke rehabilitation, which combined with virtual reality allows for introducing game-based interactions into rehabilitation. However, the control of the MI-BCI may be difficult to obtain and users may face poor performance which frustrates them and potentially affects their motivation to use the technology. Decreases in motivation could be reduced by increasing the users' sense of agency over the system. The aim of this study was to understand whether embodiment (ownership) of a hand depicted in virtual reality can enhance the sense of agency to reduce frustration in an MI-BCI task. Twenty-two healthy participants participated in a within-subject study where their sense of agency was compared in two different embodiment experiences: 1) avatar hand (with body), or 2) abstract blocks. Both representations closed with a similar motion for spatial congruency and popped a balloon as a result. The hand/blocks were controlled through an online MI-BCI. Each condition consisted of 30 trials of MI-activation of the avatar hand/blocks. After each condition a questionnaire probed the participants' sense of agency, ownership, and frustration. Afterwards, a semi-structured interview was performed where the participants elaborated on their ratings. Both conditions supported similar levels of MI-BCI performance. A significant correlation between ownership and agency was observed (r = 0.47, p = 0.001). As intended, the avatar hand yielded much higher ownership than the blocks. When controlling for performance, ownership increased sense of agency. In conclusion, designers of BCI-based rehabilitation applications can draw on anthropomorphic avatars for the visual mapping of the trained limb to improve ownership. While not While not reducing frustration ownership can improve perceived agency given sufficient BCI performance. In future studies the findings should be validated in stroke patients since they may perceive agency and ownership differently than able-bodied users.

Depressive traits are associated with a reduced effect of choice on implicit sense of agency

Our everyday actions and their subsequent outcomes are accompanied by a feeling of control or agency. This sense of agency (SoA) is dependent on the contribution of both prospective factors (e.g., action choice), and retrospective factors (e.g., outcome valence) with considerable variation in the population. We manipulated freedom of choice and valence of outcome to assess the relationship between implicit SoA and subclinical depressive and psychosis-like traits in a cohort of healthy young adults. Participants (N=150) completed a Libet Clock task, in which they had either a free or forced choice of which of two buttons to press, and received either a positive or negative outcome (cash register or klaxon). Participants were required to judge the time on the clock the tone sounded. We measured outcome binding, the shift in the perceived time of the outcome back in time towards the moment of the action. Participants also completed questionnaires on both depressive and psychosis-like traits. Positive outcomes strongly increased intentional binding. The evidence favoured no effect of freedom of choice on average, but this was influenced by inter-individual differences. Individuals reporting more depressive traits had less of a difference in intentional binding between free and forced choice conditions. The findings show that implicit SoA is sensitive to outcome valence and differs across the subclinical depression continuum.

Commanding or being a simple intermediary: how does it affect moral behavior and related brain mechanisms?

History has shown that fractioning operations between several individuals along a hierarchical chain allows diffusing responsibility between components of the chain, which has the potential to disinhibit antisocial actions. Here, we present two studies, one using fMRI (Study 1) and one using EEG (Study 2), designed to help understand how commanding or being in an intermediary position impacts the sense of agency and empathy for pain. In the age of military drones, we also explored whether commanding a human or robot agent influences these measures. This was done within a single behavioral paradigm in which participants could freely decide whether or not to send painful shocks to another participant in exchange for money. In Study 1, fMRI reveals that activation in social cognition and empathy-related brain regions was equally low when witnessing a victim receive a painful shock while participants were either commander or simple intermediary transmitting an order, compared to being the agent directly delivering the shock. In Study 2, results indicated that the sense of agency did not differ between commanders and intermediary, no matter if the executing agent was a robot or a human. However, we observed that the neural response over P3 was higher when the executing agent was a robot compared to a human. Source reconstruction of the EEG signal revealed that this effect was mediated by areas including the insula and ACC. Results are discussed regarding the interplay between the sense of agency and empathy for pain for decision-making.

Towards an Epistemology of Reading: Defining the Process of Reading in Modern Terms

The chaotic space caused by information explosion in present times has made the process and purpose of reading to be always questioned. Technological advancement has made reading appear as a mere mockery at the very outset. But the world still prioritizes knowledge that is acquired through observation, valuation and interpretation. At the time of Big Data, there still persists a sense of agency to define a given information as episteme. The present essay emphasizes on looking at reading as a modern phenomenon by presupposing the epistemological presence at the centre of any rational pursuit. Based on the Kantian precepts on enlightenment, the paper attempts to understand this presence of knowledge by delving into the major disciplines of modern philosophy that help in observing, valuing and interpreting the act of reading in present times. More than laying terms for defining the text within the modern space, the study essentializes reading in a virtually driven algorithmic world.

Seeking reputation or money? The influence of sociality mental modes on sense of agency in social contexts

Sociality mental modes (i.e., market mode primed by money cues and communal mode primed by eye gaze) refer to the ways people interact with others in distinct manners(individuals are inclined to share resources with others regardless of the personal costs and benefits in the communal mode but have a personal relationship with others based on cost-benefit ratios in the market mode), and they affect social interaction and even affect the subjective experience. The sense of agency (SoA) is a subjective experience of one’s degree of control over external events. But little is known about the influence of sociality mental modes on the SoA. Previous studies have shown that social exclusion reduces the SoA. Here, we examined whether sociality mental modes affect the sense of agency by intentional binding paradigm and 9-point Likert scale (experiment 1) in social contexts by priming social exclusion and social inclusion through a recall task (experiment 2). The results showed that in social exclusion conditions, the market mode group had a shorter estimate of time, and the communal mode group had a higher rating of agency than the control group. This study demonstrates that social inclusion context improves the explicit sense of agency. In the context of social exclusion and inclusion, the market mode enhances the implicit sense of agency, that is, pursuing money; the communal mode reduces the explicit sense of agency, that is, seeking reputation.

“Their Spidery Self”: On Webs of Subject-Object Empathy in Bernardine Evaristo’s Fiction

Drawing on the theoretical premises of Anthropocene feminism, new materialist feminism and empathy studies, this paper represents an attempt to explore the mutually constitutive relations conjured in Bernardine Evaristo’s fiction between subjects and the object worlds they inhabit. Focusing on Lara (1997) and Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as examples of “fusion fiction,” the paper explores the ways in which a composite sense of agency is articulated between the human and the nonhuman, shaping what feminist thinkers from Rosi Braidotti to Jane Bennett envision as our posthuman horizons.

EXPRESS: Behavioral evidence of altered sensory attenuation in obesity

Body ownership (i.e., the conscious belief of owning a body) and sense of agency (i.e., being the agent of one’s own movements) are part of a pre-reflective experience of bodily self, which grounds on low-level complex sensory–motor processes. While previous literature had already investigated body ownership in obesity, sense of agency was never explored. Here, we exploited the sensory attenuation effect (i.e., an implicit marker of the sense of agency; SA effect) to investigate whether the sense of agency was altered in a sample of eighteen individuals affected by obesity as compared with eighteen healthy-weight individuals. In our experiment, participants were asked to rate the perceived intensity of self-generated and other-generated tactile stimuli. Healthy-weight individuals showed a significantly greater SA effect than participants affected by obesity. Indeed, while healthy-weight participants perceived self-generated stimuli as significantly less intense as compared to externally generated ones, this difference between stimuli was not reported by affected participants. Our results relative to the SA effect pinpointed an altered sense of agency in obesity. We discussed this finding within the motor control framework with reference to obesity. We encouraged future research to further explore such effect and its role in shaping the clinical features of obesity.