Agency

Feeling Agency (FoA) connects us to the world around us. It is often described as "the feeling of being in control, of being the source of ones thoughts, actions and their consequences." And equivalent to many feelings, we mostly don't notice Agency when we think, move or interact.

One well-known model about the source of this feeling of being in control is the comparator-model. This model works on the assumption that we constantly make predictions about our body and our world around us. Especially when we act, we feed a copy of the efferece signal (which we send to our muscles to move them) into a feed-forward model. This feed-forward model then predicts not only the outcome of this action, the resulting state, but also the corresponding sensory consequences: When I touch the hot oven, it will hurt.
This predicted sensory consequence is then compared to what we actually sense. If they match, we feel Agency and everything goes as expected.

The Mario-Cart Effect

Think of the first time you played Mario Cart with some other people - potentially your friends. It might have happened that you thought you were performing pretty well. You might be a natural at this!
Then you realised that while you were watching Luigi in the upper right corner leading the crowd, poor Yoshi in the bottom left was somehow running into a wall all the time. Wait. Didn't you choose Yoshi?

We can observe a few known and intuitive characteristics of Agency in this example: * Expectation matters: Our predictions - based on our known models of the physical world - set the anchor point for our expectations. And expectations are what we measure the observed results against. Expectations are, however, not dependent solely on the outer physical world. They might be biased, e.g. with the: * Performance bias: We tend to rather attribute preferrable outcomes to our actions than such which are bad for us. * ...