Agency-Driven Biases in Visual Selective Attention

Attentional selection is driven by a complex interplay between endogenous cues (e.g., words or symbols indicating the likely identities or locations of task-relevant objects), exogenous cues (e.g., salient stimulus features such as unique motion or color), and past experience (e.g., selection history). Recently, one’s interactions with the physical world have also been shown to bias attention. Specifically, the sense of agency that arises when our actions cause predictable outcomes to bias our attention toward those things which we control, even when our actions are task-irrelevant or divorced from volitional decision-making. In these three experiments, I investigated how these agency-driven attentional biases interact with other drivers of attentional selection. Participants controlled the movement of one object while others moved independently. In a subsequent search task, targets that were previously controlled were found faster than those that were not. This benefit of agency augmented effects of valid endogenous cues as well as effects of selection history. Moreover, agency effects were observed when endogenous and exogenous cues as well as historical information contradicted current goals. Thus, agency does not lose informative value when other additional drivers of selection are simultaneously available.