Automation Technology and Sense of Control: A Window on Human Agency

Previous studies have shown that the perceived times of voluntary actions and their effects are perceived as shifted towards each other, so that the interval between action and outcome seems shortened. This has been referred to as ‘intentional binding’ (IB). However, the generality of this effect remains unclear. Here we demonstrate that Intentional Binding also occurs in complex control situations. Using an aircraft supervision task with different autopilot settings, our results first indicated a strong relation between measures of IB and different levels of system automation. Second, measures of IB were related to explicit agency judgement in this applied setting. We discuss the implications for the underlying mechanisms, and for sense of agency in automated environments.