The Effects of Agency on Attentional Selection and Control

When our actions cause predictable outcomes in the environment we experience a sense of agency, or a feeling of control over an object or situation. Recently, this sense of agency, or one’s interactions with the physical world, has been shown to bias attention. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how the sense of agency might affect the ways in which we selectively attend to objects. In the first experiment, I utilized eye tracking to explore how and when agency-driven selection is deployed while interacting with the environment. I then discussed a set of experiments which examined the possible mechanisms underlying the connection between a sense of agency and attentional selection. I then presented work identifying how agency-driven attentional selection interacts with simultaneously presented endogenous (words) and exogenous (color singletons) environmental cues. The final experiment investigated the possibility that the attentional benefits gained from the sense of agency compound over time. Together, these studies show that not only does the sense of agency play a significant role in the allocation of attention, but that this agency-driven selection is a robust and dynamic phenomenon.