The Mario Kart Effect - Confusion as a Metric for Agency in Continuous Control

A Sense of Agency (SoA) allows us to attribute sensory events to our own actions.It thus aids in staying calibrated with the world whilst ignoring irrelevant sensoryinput. To date most SoA research has focused on subjective ratings and perceivedtiming or intensity of isolated discrete events, metrics that are not easily extendedto continuous movement. Here, we present an approach to quantify Agency usingconfusion about the object under control. Inspired by multiplayer video games,such as Mario Kart, we argue that misattribution of control to one of multipleacting objects can be identified from human behaviour and serve as a proxy fora SoA. In two continuous control experiments we collected explicit reports aboutconfusion of control and implicit reactions to confusions. A comparison basedperspective on SoA extended by additional static and dynamic Agency cues canexplain how visual and dynamic ambiguity with other acting objects in the sceneinfluence this implicit Agency measure and participants’ gaze behaviour. Further,we identified core challenges for using explicit reports when measuring SoA incontinuous settings. Using confusion between targets of the SoA offers a new wayto explore Agency in continuous motor control.