Sense of Agency as a Basis of Perceptual Decision-Making in Visual Search

Understanding how and why individuals make decisions during visual search has historically formed the basis of a large body of research. When presenting individuals with choice between visual contexts, such as in a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, analyzing context selection can provide insight into motivation for context preference and decision-making. At the same time, these types of tasks inherently contain elements of volition that may affect the alignment of top-down information and feelings of agency during visual search. I presently assert that subject preference during two-alternative forced-choice visual search tasks is driven by a sense of agency, forming a basis for perceptual preference in visual search. Employing a choice paradigm, it was determined that instructing individuals to select contexts based on feelings of agency resulted in patterns of behavior statistically indistinguishable from behaviors seen when asking individuals to freely select contexts (Gibson et al., 2021). Additionally, using a within-subjects design to directly measure the alignment of top-down information with sense of agency found that in a force-choice task, patterns of context preference represent feelings of agency more consistent with an alignment of information and agency. These findings mirrored previous research supporting the inclusion of an element of volition as sufficient in moderating the relationship between information and agency in visual search. Finally, testing this notion further by manipulating the amount of volition present in our experimental paradigm, this manipulation was found to be sufficient in moderating feelings of agency reported under various values of top-down information.