TY - JOUR
T1 - Control used and control felt
T2 - Two sides of the agency coin
AU - Potts, Cory A.
AU - Carlson, Richard A.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Matti Vuorre, Stephen Agauas, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful suggestions on the manuscript. We also thank guest editors Joo-Hyun Song and Tim Welsh for organizing this special issue of Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Finally, we thank Sophie Paolizzi, Lisa Stevenson, Nancy Dennis, Bob Sainburg, and Brad Wyble for illuminating discussions. The data and supplemental material for these experiments are available via Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/q263x/?view_only=a11b00d98ee54cea946ad02968c73db9 Neither of the experiments was preregistered.
PY - 2019/10/1
Y1 - 2019/10/1
N2 - Agency has been defined as the sense of ownership and control of our actions, and the metacognition of agency has now been examined in a number of studies. Here we examined the relations between task demands, the feeling of being in control, and the feeling of using control. As task demands increase, we might feel as if we use a lot of control while feeling little control over the task. It therefore seems possible that the amount of control one feels they have used and how much in control one feels are separable components of the metacognition of control. In two experiments, we manipulated task demands and assessed these two aspects of metacognition. The source of task demand differed for the two experiments. In Experiment 1, we manipulated task demands by varying the sizes of targets in an aiming task. As predicted, we found that reports of control used increased, while reports of control felt decreased, for more difficult aiming conditions. In Experiment 2, we found a similar relation using a different source of demand: response conflict. We connect these reports of control to previous investigations of task demand and agency, as well as prominent conceptions of cognitive control.
AB - Agency has been defined as the sense of ownership and control of our actions, and the metacognition of agency has now been examined in a number of studies. Here we examined the relations between task demands, the feeling of being in control, and the feeling of using control. As task demands increase, we might feel as if we use a lot of control while feeling little control over the task. It therefore seems possible that the amount of control one feels they have used and how much in control one feels are separable components of the metacognition of control. In two experiments, we manipulated task demands and assessed these two aspects of metacognition. The source of task demand differed for the two experiments. In Experiment 1, we manipulated task demands by varying the sizes of targets in an aiming task. As predicted, we found that reports of control used increased, while reports of control felt decreased, for more difficult aiming conditions. In Experiment 2, we found a similar relation using a different source of demand: response conflict. We connect these reports of control to previous investigations of task demand and agency, as well as prominent conceptions of cognitive control.
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U2 - 10.3758/s13414-019-01771-y
DO - 10.3758/s13414-019-01771-y
M3 - Article
C2 - 31165456
AN - SCOPUS:85067254246
VL - 81
SP - 2304
EP - 2319
JO - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
JF - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
SN - 1943-3921
IS - 7
ER -