Launch! Self-agency as a discriminative cue for humans (Homo sapiens) and monkeys (Macaca Mulatta).

ABSTRACT: Self-agency is a crucial aspect of self-awareness. It is underresearched given the phenomenon's subjectivity and difficulty of study. It is particularly underresearched comparatively, given that animals cannot receive agency instructions or make agency declarations. Accordingly, we developed a distinctively new self-agency paradigm. Humans and rhesus macaques learned event categories differentiated by whether the participant's volitional response controlled a screen launch. They learned by trial and error after minimal instructions with no agency orientation (humans) or no instructions (monkeys). After learning, humans' verbalized category descriptions were coded for self-agency attributions. Across three experiments, humans' agency attributions qualitatively improved discrimination perfor

SUBMITTER: Smith JD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8277898 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature