Metacognition bridges experiences and beliefs in sense of agency

Abstract

Cognitive scientists differentiate the “minimal self” – subjective experiences of agency and ownership in our sensorimotor interactions with the world – from declarative beliefs about the self that are sustained over time. However, it remains an open question how individual sensory experiences of agency are integrated into the belief of being an agent. We administered a sensorimotor task to measure subjects’ (n = 195) propensity to classify stimuli as self-caused and metacognitive monitoring of such judgements, and we compared these behavioral metrics to declarative beliefs about their agency. Subjects who were less sensitive to control cues also reported more negative agency beliefs, though positive beliefs were not clearly correlated with any sensorimotor measure. Importantly, this relationship between first-order sensitivity and declarative beliefs essentially disappears when controlling for metacognitive sensitivity. Results suggest agency beliefs are not related directly to the propensity to make positive agency judgements but are connected through introspective access.