The modulation of sense of agency by outcome delay

Sense of agency, the feeling of causing events, depends on the temporal proximity between an action and its outcome. Current study aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding on the modulation of sense of agency by time (i.e., outcome delay). There were three main questions in the present study; a) whether sense of agency modulation by delay depends on the temporal context that the experienced outcome delays constituted b) according to which temporal scale sense of agency is modulated c) whether the implicit and explicit sense of agency presents similar patterns in terms of the effect of outcome delay and its context-dependency. Results showed that a) the effect of outcome delay on agency ratings in a temporal context decreased (a marker of central tendency effect) with experience b) agency judgment was modulated as a function of absolute temporal proximity rather than discriminability between outcome delays suggesting that temporal modulation of sense of agency is not a function of cognitive timing, and c) consistent with the findings in explicit agency judgment, the central tendency was also observed in the implicit sense of agency even though the effect of delay was in the opposite direction compared to explicit sense of agency (increasing effect in the former). These findings shed light on the nature of and the mechanism behind the effect of outcome delay on the different levels of sense of agency.