An examination of the sequential trial effect on experiences of agency in the Simon task

Abstract

Previous research shows that agency experiences are reduced when response selection is dysfluent. Expanding on this work, we report two experiments addressing the influence of Simon response conflict on agency. Participants responded to congruent and incongruent Simon task trials and indicated their experienced agency after each response. Results show that incongruent trials were related to reduced agency experiences, thus replicating earlier work on the response-selection agency-link. Furthermore, the data further showed an interesting sequence effect: The congruency effect on experienced agency mainly emerged when a trial was preceded by a congruent trial. There was however no congruency effect on experienced agency when a trial was preceded by an incongruent trial. These findings are briefly discussed in the context of research on response selection and experiences of agency.