The sense of agency when working with human and robotic partners

Burke, Thomas Peter (2024) The sense of agency when working with human and robotic partners. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

When we perform an action, we are aware that we are the one acting on our environment. This experience is known as the “sense of agency”. Research has shown that the sense of agency is not an all-or-nothing construct but instead is malleable and graded. As such, it can be increased and decreased by internal and external factors. More recently, researchers have sought to understand how the sense of agency can be manipulated through social context. This thesis was written to expand on previous research within this area.

Experiments 1-3 looked to understand how explicit agency can be altered by working with a partner. In each experiment, we manipulated whether the participants would be told that they were working with a human, a robotic avatar, or a preprogrammed computer. We asked participants how much control they felt over their action on each trial. We found that consistently people report control over their actions as lower when working with a partner, irrespective of the type of partner that they are working with.

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, experiments in this thesis were all conducted online, The sense of agency can be measured through both implicit and explicit measures. Experiment 4 looks to understand whether temporal binding can occur through the interval estimation methodology, an implicit measure of the sense of agency, in an online environment. The results show that this is indeed the case.

Experiments 5-8 investigated how working with a partner could affect temporal binding, along with explicit agency. In a paradigm analogous to Experiment 1-3, we found that working with a partner reduced explicit agency compared with working alone, implicit agency (temporal binding) increased. We found that this temporal binding increase seems to be specific to the partner being able to act, rather than a mere presence effect.

Experiments 9-10 were further adaptations of Experiments 1-3, looking specifically at explicit agency. Experiment 9 investigated whether explicit agency when working with a partner can be affected by whether the participants are playing for their own points or not. We found that explicit agency was lowered by working for points that were not their own, along with the reduction in agency from working with a partner. Finally, Experiment 10 investigated how explicit agency when working with a partner is formed in moral scenarios. We found that the partner effect persists in paradigms with moral contexts. Furthermore, people still report agency over non-actions that have moral consequence. The results in this thesis expand the literature on the sense of agency and will contribute to a better understanding of our own experience when working with others.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Zoe White
Date Deposited:	11 Feb 2025 16:04
Last Modified:	11 Feb 2025 16:04
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98451
DOI:

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