To prevent means to know: Explicit but no implicit agency for prevention behavior
Human agents draw on a variety of explicit and implicit cues to construct a sense of agency for their actions and the effects of these actions on the outside world. Associative mechanisms binding actions to their immediate effects support the evolution of agency for operant actions. However, human a...
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Published in | Cognition Vol. 206; p. 104489 |
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Main Authors | , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Netherlands
Elsevier B.V
01.01.2021
Elsevier Science Ltd |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Human agents draw on a variety of explicit and implicit cues to construct a sense of agency for their actions and the effects of these actions on the outside world. Associative mechanisms binding actions to their immediate effects support the evolution of agency for operant actions. However, human agents often also act to prevent a certain event from occurring. Such prevention behavior poses a critical challenge for the sense of agency, as successful prevention inherently revolves around the absence of a perceivable effect. By assessing the psychological microstructure of singular operant and prevention actions we show that this comes with profound consequences: agency for prevention actions is only evident in explicit measures but not in corresponding implicit proxies. These findings attest to an altered action representation in prevention behavior and they support recent proposals to model related processes such as avoidance learning in terms of propositional rather than associative terms. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0010-0277 1873-7838 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104489 |