Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The sense of agency (SoA) represents the everyday experience of control over our actions and their outcomes. We posit a new framework that defines SoA as consisting of three main components: sense of control of self, sense of control of the environment, and the presence of a goal. Across five experiments, we test this framework by altering participants' SoA over their actions and outcomes by manipulating the predictability of each. Results suggest that both actions and outcomes affect participants' SoA. We also report, contrary to previous theoretical predictions, that unpredictable outcomes lead to the lowest SoA as compared to actions. Additionally, results from explicit measures suggest that participants do not discriminate between control over actions and outcomes and that this remains true regardless of experimental design or explicit agency question type. Taken together, these results suggest that both actions and outcomes are vital to the experience of control.