Action Plan Diversity in Children During Control Exploration: Link Between Action and Sense of Agency

Abstract

The sense of agency refers to the subjective feeling of controlling one’s own actions and, through them, external events. Despite actions containing rich information about human subjective feelings, there are very few ways to abstract such information. The present study aims to use a new method of action analysis to examine whether action plans contain information for measuring the sense of agency both across different conditions (i.e., within participants) and among different individuals. The present study employed an action plan analysis utilizing transformer-LSTM-based autoencoders on a movement dataset of 167 children in a control detection task collected previously in a published paper. This analysis can capture high-level, abstract representations of sequences of motor commands (referred to as action plans) and quantify control exploration behaviors. The action plan diversity showed a sigmoid-like function of control, indicating that actions indeed contain rich information regarding the sense of agency. Furthermore, the individual slope of action plan diversity against control, referred to as action plan sensitivity, significantly correlated with individual control detection accuracy, suggesting that this index can also be used as an inter-individual measure of sense of agency. Our results suggest that simply observing how actions change under different control conditions can quantitatively reflect the emergence of the sense of agency in children. The findings and methodology provide a highly novel and useful tool for studying the sense of agency in broader populations and species in future studies.