Absolute, not perceived, delay modulates agency judgement: Evidence for cognitive impenetrability of sense of agency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The sense of agency, which refers to awareness of causing events, is consistently influenced by the time interval between actions and their outcomes such that longer delays diminish the perceived strength of the agency. This study investigated whether the sense of agency is modulated by the distance between experienced delays or by their subjective discriminability, which is known to be subject to Weber's law (discriminability being a function of ratios rather than absolute differences between time intervals). To this end, participants executed keypress actions leading to outcomes at varying delays. In one experiment, delays were equidistant on a logarithmic scale (constant ratio relationship), while in the other experiment, they were equidistant on a linear scale (constant distance relationship). Our results showed that judgments of the agency were predicted better by actual temporal proximity between actions and outcomes compared with their subjective discriminability. Beyond providing a more complete picture regarding the effect of outcome delays on the sense of agency, these findings have broader implications for the mechanistic underpinnings of the sense of agency. They imply that even explicit judgments of agency can be influenced by certain factors transcending conscious experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".