The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology

Sense of agency stems from the action-effect congruency based on internal prediction. Explicit measure of sense of agency includes self-report judgment. In contrast, implicit measure consists of the degree of intentional binding in which the temporal action-effect interval is perceived as shorter than the actual interval. We examined whether agency judgment and intentional binding correlate while being modulated by the action-effect temporal congruency. Participants performed voluntary keypresses that triggered a tone after variable delays. Subsequently, participants rated their agency over the tone and estimated the keypress-tone interval. The agency rating and degree of intentional binding decreased with increasing tone delays. Importantly, there was a positive correlation between the slopes of linear regression for agency rating and intentional binding with the tone delay as an independent variable. These results suggest a common basis for the explicit and implicit agency in terms of temporal prediction.