Papers by Katharina A. Schwarz
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
In the last years, it has become general consensus that actions change our time perception. Perfo... more In the last years, it has become general consensus that actions change our time perception. Performing an action to elicit a specific event seems to lead to a systematic underestimation of the interval between action and effect, a phenomenon termed temporal (or previously intentional) binding. Temporal binding has been closely associated with sense of agency, our perceived control over our actions and our environment, and because of its robust behavioral effects has indeed been widely utilized as an implicit correlate of sense of agency. The most robust and clear temporal binding effects are typically found via Libet clock paradigms. In the present study, we investigate a crucial methodological confound in these paradigms that provides an alternative explanation for temporal binding effects: a redirection of attentional resources in two-event sequences (as in classical operant conditions) versus singular events (as in classical baseline conditions). Our results indicate that binding...
Preregistration, data, and analysis scripts (SPSS 25) for the paper "To prevent means to kno... more Preregistration, data, and analysis scripts (SPSS 25) for the paper "To prevent means to know: Explicit but no implicit agency for prevention behaviour"
Cognition, 2021
Human agents draw on a variety of explicit and implicit cues to construct a sense of agency for t... more 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.
Supplementary Figure S1. Raw data of pain sensitivity ratings. A. Pain sensitivity ratings for ea... more Supplementary Figure S1. Raw data of pain sensitivity ratings. A. Pain sensitivity ratings for each group and each day. The effect of gender-related expectancy manipulation is significant both, when comparing the two main groups of interest (interaction Time x Expectancy Manipulation; MLPS vs. FLPS) as well as in the omnibus analysis (interaction Time x Expectancy Manipulation; MLPS vs. FLPS vs. Control). Moreover, the pain ratings on the first day were generally higher than on the second day, F(1,102) = 24.97, p < .001, ηp 2 = .20, however group-wise paired t-tests reveal only significant differences between day 1 and day 2 in the MLPS, t(33) = 4.75, p < .
Consciousness and Cognition, 2019
The sense of agency, i.e., the notion that we, as agents, are in control of our own actions and c... more The sense of agency, i.e., the notion that we, as agents, are in control of our own actions and can affect our environment by acting, is an integral part of human volition. Recent work has attempted to ground agency in basic mechanisms of human action control. Along these lines, action-effect binding has been shown to affect explicit judgments of agency. Here, we investigate if such action-effect bindings are also related to temporal binding which is often used as an implicit measure of agency. In two experiments, we found evidence for the establishment of short-term action-effect bindings as well as temporal binding effects. However, the two phenomena were not associated with each other. This finding suggests that the relation of action control and agency is not a simple one, and it adds to the evidence in favor of a dissociation between subjective agency and perceptual biases such as temporal binding. 1. Introduction An integral part of our (voluntary) actions is the underlying notion that we, as agents, are in control over these actions and that we can affect the world around us through these actions. The corresponding mental state, the sense of agency, is a crucial component of acting and abnormal expressions of agency have been associated with severe mental illnesses, such as delusions of control in schizophrenic patients (
Consciousness and Cognition, 2019
The sense of agency, i.e., the feeling of control over one's own actions and their consequences i... more The sense of agency, i.e., the feeling of control over one's own actions and their consequences in the environment, is a crucial part of action taking. In experimental studies, agency is most commonly measured either directly via explicit agency ratings or indirectly via implicit measures, e.g., temporal binding. In order to aid our interpretation of previous and future results, several studies have focused on relating implicit and explicit measures of agency to one another. However, possibly due to different methodological issues, results have been far from conclusive. In the present study, we therefore contribute to this discussion by further characterizing temporal binding and explicit agency ratings in their response to action choice as an experimental manipulation in a high-powered design, and by studying how temporal binding and agency ratings are related in different experimental conditions. Furthermore, we discuss the possible influence of the specific agency question regarding the participants' ratings. 1. Introduction Healthy human beings feel in control of their own actions and believe themselves to be capable of affecting their environment by acting. This notion of control and causation is often summarized as the sense of agency, and it has wide-reaching consequences in our society. The sense of agency allows the correct identification of actions as "own" or "other" (
Consciousness and Cognition, 2018
The sense of agency is a pervasive phenomenon that accompanies conscious acting and extends to th... more The sense of agency is a pervasive phenomenon that accompanies conscious acting and extends to the consequences of one's actions in the environment. Subjective feelings of agency are typically explained in terms of predictive processes, based on internal forward models inherent to the sensorimotor system, and postdictive processes, i.e., explicit, retrospective judgments by the agent. Only recently, research has begun to elucidate the link between sense of agency and more basic processes of human action control. The present study was conducted in this spirit and explored the relation between short-term action-effect binding and explicit agency judgments. We found evidence for such a link in that the participants' short-term action-effect binding predicted subsequent agency ratings. This offers a new perspective on the sense of agency, providing an additional mechanism (together with predictive and postdictive processes) that may underlie its formation.
Scientific Reports, 2019
Stereotypes are abundant in everyday life – and whereas their influence on cognitive and motor pe... more Stereotypes are abundant in everyday life – and whereas their influence on cognitive and motor performance is well documented, a causal role in pain processing is still elusive. Nevertheless, previous studies have implicated gender-related stereotype effects in pain perception as potential mediators partly accounting for sex effects on pain. An influence of stereotypes on pain seems indeed likely as pain measures have proven especially susceptible to expectancy effects such as placebo effects. However, so far empirical approaches to stereotype effects on pain are correlational rather than experimental. In this study, we aimed at documenting gender-related stereotypes on pain perception and processing by actively manipulating the participants’ awareness of common stereotypical expectations. We discovered that gender-related stereotypes can significantly modulate pain perception which was mirrored by activity levels in pain-associated brain areas.
Journal of Cognitive Enhancement, 2018
Computer games have been proposed as effective tools for cognitive enhancement. Especially first-... more Computer games have been proposed as effective tools for cognitive enhancement. Especially first-person shooter (FPS) games have been found to yield a range of positive effects, and these positive effects also apply to the domain of executive functioning. Only a particular area of executive functioning has been shown to resist training via FPS games, and this area is task-switching performance. Here, we tested whether games of a different genre, real-time strategy (RTS) games, offer a more promising approach to improve task-switching performance, because RTS games capitalize on precisely this behavior. A high-powered, quasi-experimental comparison of RTS and FPS players indicated reliable costs for task-switching across both player groupswith similar performance on multiple indicators, comprising switch costs, mixing costs, voluntary switch rates, and psychological refractory period effects. Performance of both groups further did not exceed the performance of a control group of Chess and Go players. These results corroborate previous findings on the robustness of cognitive costs of task-switching. At the same time, our results also suggest that the precise characteristics of different computer games might not be critical in determining potential training effects. Keywords Task-switching. Executive functions. Computer games. Cognitive training. Cognitive enhancement BAy-yay-yay, the multi-tasking...the multi-tasking!M embTV, Caster (Age of Empires II)
Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
Journal of Economic Psychology, 2018
Deliberate rule violations have typically been addressed from a motivational perspective that ask... more Deliberate rule violations have typically been addressed from a motivational perspective that asked whether or not agents decide to violate rules based on contextual factors and moral considerations. Here we complement motivational approaches by providing a cognitive perspective on the processes that operate during the act of committing an unsolicited rule violation. Participants were tested in a task that allowed for violating traffic rules by exploiting forbidden shortcuts in a virtual city maze. Results yielded evidence for sustained cognitive conflict that affected performance from right before a violation throughout actually committing the violation. These findings open up a new theoretical perspective on violation behavior that focuses on processes occurring right at the moment a rule violation takes place.
Acta psychologica, Jan 25, 2018
Anticipated action effects have been shown to govern action selection and initiation, as describe... more Anticipated action effects have been shown to govern action selection and initiation, as described in ideomotor theory, and they have also been demonstrated to determine crosstalk between different tasks in multitasking studies. Such effect-based crosstalk was observed not only in a forward manner (with a first task influencing performance in a following second task) but also in a backward manner (the second task influencing the preceding first task), suggesting that action effect codes can become activated prior to a capacity-limited processing stage often denoted as response selection. The process of effect-based response production, by contrast, has been proposed to be capacity-limited. These observations jointly suggest that effect code activation can occur independently of effect-based response production, though this theoretical implication has not been tested directly at present. We tested this hypothesis by employing a dual-task set-up in which we manipulated the ease of eff...
Journal of experimental psychology. General, Jan 20, 2017
Sensory consequences of an agent's actions are perceived less intensely than sensory stimuli ... more Sensory consequences of an agent's actions are perceived less intensely than sensory stimuli that are not caused (and thus not predicted) by the observer. This effect of sensory attenuation has been discussed as a key principle of perception, potentially mediating various crucial functions such as agency and the discrimination of self-caused sensory stimulation from stimuli caused by external factors. Precise models describe the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon across a variety of modalities, especially the auditory, tactile, and visual domain. Despite these strong claims, empirical evidence for sensory attenuation in the visual domain is surprisingly sparse and ambiguous. In the present article, the authors therefore aim to clarify the role of sensory attenuation for learned visual action effects. To this end, the authors present a comprehensive replication effort including 3 separate, high-powered experiments on sensory attenuation in the visual domain with 1 direc...
Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 2017
The feeling of being watched has several well-documented consequences, from social facilitation t... more The feeling of being watched has several well-documented consequences, from social facilitation to the induction of pro-social behavior. Even though the effects of being watched have long been in the focus of scientific interest, it remains unclear which features determine the actual subjective feeling of being watched. We report 2 experiments to approach this question. Participants were confronted with pictures showing the faces of different creatures while imagining being in an embarrassing situation. Participants rated for each creature in each situation how strongly they felt watched and how much ability they ascribed to the creature to reflect on the situation. A betweenexperiment manipulation of how much ability was ascribed to a particular creature further probed for a causal relation between the 2 variables. Results confirmed that the creature's ascribed ability to reflect on the situation is a key component that determines the feeling of being watched in humans.
Psychology, health & medicine, Jan 24, 2017
Patient studies provide insights into mechanisms underlying diseases and thus represent a corners... more Patient studies provide insights into mechanisms underlying diseases and thus represent a cornerstone of clinical research. In this study, we report evidence that differences between patients and controls might partly be based on expectations generated by the patients' knowledge of being invited and treated as a patient: the Being a Patient effect (BP effect). This finding extends previous neuropsychological reports on diagnosis threat. Participants with mild allergies were addressed either as patients or control subjects in a clinical study. We measured the impact of this group labeling and corresponding instructions on pain perception and cognitive performance. Our results provide evidence that the BP effect can indeed affect physiological and cognitive measures in clinical settings. Importantly, these effects can lead to systematic overestimation of genuine disease effects and should be taken into account when disease effects are investigated. Finally, we propose strategies t...
Advances in cognitive psychology, 2017
When observing another agent performing simple actions, these actions are systematically remember... more When observing another agent performing simple actions, these actions are systematically remembered as one's own after a brief period of time. Such observation inflation has been documented as a robust phenomenon in studies in which participants passively observed videotaped actions. Whether observation inflation also holds for direct, face-to-face interactions is an open question that we addressed in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants commanded the experimenter to carry out certain actions, and they indeed reported false memories of self-performance in a later memory test. The effect size of this inflation effect was similar to passive observation as confirmed by Experiment 2. These findings suggest that observation inflation might affect action memory in a broad range of real-world interactions.
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Papers by Katharina A. Schwarz