Attentional Control and Inferences of Agency: Working Memory Load Differentially Modulates Goal-based and Prime-based Agency Experiences

Previous research indicates that people can infer self-agency, the experience of causing outcomes as a result of one’s own actions, in situations where information about action-outcomes is pre-activated through goal-setting or priming. We argue that goal-based agency inferences rely on attentional control that processes information about matches and mismatches between intended and actual outcomes. Prime-based inferences follow an automatic cognitive accessibility process that relies on matches between primed and actual information about outcomes. We tested an improved task for a better examination of goal-based vs. primed-based agency inferences, and examined the moderating effect of working memory load on both types of inferences. Findings of four studies showed that goal-based, but not prime-based agency inferences dwindled under working memory load. These findings suggest that goal-based (vs. primed-based) agency inferences indeed rely on attentional control, thus rendering goal-based agency inferences especially prone to conditions that modulate goal-directed control processes.