Humans progressively feel agency over events triggered before their actions

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become increasingly efficient in anticipating our behavior. Will this impact, in the near future, how much we feel control over events generated with AI-assistance? This would in turn influence our decisions, actions, mental health and sense of responsibility. In everyday life, our sense of agency over events occurring at various delays after our actions has adapted to accommodate these delays. Here, we investigate whether our sense of agency can also adapt to an unusual situation where a consequence precedes an action. We used an online game in which players aimed to beat the computer at finding and clicking on a target to trigger an animation, while, in fact, an algorithm triggered the animation before the players click. The animation was not randomly controlled by the algorithm, but rather based on the history of the players past movements and on the beginning of their current movement. We used correlational, machine learning decoding, and modelling approaches to capture how players compute their reported sense of agency over the animation. We found evidence that, in less than an hour, players implicitly learned that the timing of the animation was related to their own actions, and adapted their sense of agency accordingly. Such findings may help us to anticipate how humans will integrate AI-assistance to guide their behavior.