Discrepancy between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency: Implications for sense of agency and its disorders

• A two-step theoretical distinction of the sense of agency has been proposed.
• Separate explicit and implicit agency measures were assessed.
• Measures that are in accordance with clinical symptoms were employed.
• The results of the implicit measure and explicit measure were not correlated.
• There is an experimental dissociation in the explicit and implicit sense of agency.

The sense of agency refers to the feeling of authorship that “I am the one who is controlling external events through my own action”. A distinction between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency has been proposed theoretically. However, there has not been sufficient experimental evidence to support this distinction. We have assessed separate explicit and implicit agency measures in the same population and investigated their relationships. Intentional binding task was employed as an implicit measure and self-other attribution task as an explicit measure, which are known to reflect clinical symptoms of disorders in the sense of agency. The results of the implicit measure and explicit measure were not correlated, suggesting dissociation of the explicit judgement of agency and the implicit feeling of agency.