Sense of Agency

The sense of agency is the subjective experience of being the one who causes and controls one's own actions and their effects. In cognitive neuroscience it is often modeled by comparator (forward-model) accounts, in which the brain predicts the sensory consequences of an intended action and attributes agency when prediction matches outcome; the phenomenon of intentional binding (the perceived compression of time between a voluntary action and its effect) is a common implicit measure.

BCIs stress this machinery because the mapping from intention to effect is indirect, noisy, and delayed. Decoding latency, errors, and non-intuitive control laws can weaken the sense of agency even when task performance is adequate, leaving users feeling that the device — not they — is acting. Conversely, well-designed, low-latency, predictable decoders can restore a strong sense of agency, which correlates with acceptance and skilled use.