Mental health is becoming increasingly important in clinical settings and everyday situations alike. Here we address the role of experienced agency for mental health, i.e., the role of the experience of being in control and author of one's own actions and their consequences. The present study investigates how experience of agency is linked to mental health and coping in the face of personal and global challenges. Our data challenge a simple model of direct positive effects of agency experience for mental health for specific, challenging situations. Rather, they point toward a crucial impact of perceived responsibility that may influence when, in such situations, experiences of control affect mental health in a positive or negative manner. Interestingly, our data still confirm a generally positive association between trait assumptions of experienced agency and mental health. Stronger agency experience was further associated with more frequent use of control-related coping strategies. Exploratory analyses revealed a discrepancy between the actual use and the perceived effectiveness of coping strategies—a discrepancy that decreased with higher levels of experienced agency. Overall, the results highlight a close relationship between agency experience, mental health, and coping, while also pointing toward more complex mechanisms in specific challenging contexts. Interventions specifically aimed at strengthening agency experience may therefore represent a promising avenue for improving mental health especially when they employ measures to target the critical role of perceived responsibility.

Societal traditions and rules guide human decision-making and action. Yet, sometimes humans break with traditions by devising creative solutions and sometimes they break rules to increase personal gains. Here we asked whether creativity and rule-breaking might have more in common than meets the eye, by exploring whether labeling identical actions as either creative or rule-breaking shapes how these actions are semantically processed and cognitively represented. To assess differences in semantic processing we conducted two preregistered experiments, using a mouse-tracking paradigm: Participants of the creativity group either applied a stimulus-response mapping labeled as "traditional", or the opposing mapping labeled as "creative". For the rule violation group, the same behaviors were labeled as "follow rule" and "violate rule". Performance measures indicated a large bias against creative and rule violation options, but this bias did not differ between both groups. This observation indicates that the labels "creative" and "rule-violating" are semantically similarly processed, as both require the agent to overcome automatically retrieved response tendencies.

Recent evidence suggests that ideomotor effect anticipations rely on transitions rather than end-states. That is, humans generate motor actions not by anticipating a desired end-state, but by anticipating the change from the current situation to that desired end-state. Here, we tested whether ideomotor learning mechanisms mirror this sensitivity to transitions. To this end, we conducted three preregistered experiments employing a prime-probe design. In the prime, an action produced a visual effect. In the subsequent probe, the stimulus always either matched or mismatched this previously produced end-state. Crucially, the probe stimulus either involved the same transition of producing a novel stimulus (onset stimuli) or, alternatively, it involved only the same end-state, but a different transition resulting in that end-state (offset stimuli). Evidence for action-effect binding as a precursor of ideomotor learning emerged only when the probe transition repeated the prime transition. This suggests that ideomotor learning is mainly sensitive to transitions rather than end-states.

Binding and retrieval have been portrayed as key mechanisms in human action control. This theoretical framework posits that features of perception and action (e.g., object color, effector, etc.) are bound to each other. Afterwards, re-encountering one feature can retrieve bound features, thereby facilitating action repetition. Previous research focused on bindings with discrete response features (e.g., responding with a left or right button). This focus neglects the rich information required to control body movements. Here, we investigated continuous response features of extended movements related to both action goals and the implementation of these goals. Participants swiped their fingers on a tablet toward a small, briefly presented target circle that was accompanied by a sound. We analyzed response errors and similarity between successive response positions, depending on the sequence of (1) swiped hands, (2) irrelevant sounds, and (3) target positions. Sound repetitions did not bias responses toward preceding target or response positions whereas hand repetitions biased responding toward both positions, especially when target positions repeated. On the one hand, stimulus-response binding and retrieval seem to be remarkably focused on discrete response features, thus challenging the role of this mechanism in controlling overt body movements. On the other hand, fine-grained features of a response can be bound and retrieved from other response features, providing short-cuts to both the agents’ previous action goals and the implemented deviation from these goals. Public significance statement Humans do not explicitly think about every action. Instead, they automatically connect what they perceive with how they act, a process that facilitates repetition of actions. Yet, which aspects of perception and action can become connected remains a topic of debate. Our study shows that these connections may extend beyond categorical action features (e.g., pressing a certain button on a phone) to metric action features (e.g., touching a specific position on a screen).

Error commission is accompanied by a cascade of cognitive processes. In current views, these processes change the activation of all task-related responses in the same way (e.g., via generalized inhibition or a shift toward a more conservative response criterion). Using a three-choice task, we contrasted such response-general processes with putative response-specific processes, which are not sufficiently incorporated into contemporary views. We hypothesized that response-specific processes influence both the correct response and the erroneous response but not a third (i.e., neutral) response. To test this hypothesis, we assessed the activation of these three responses throughout the task using finger force and/or standard keypresses. Replicating prior findings, we observed evidence that response-specific processes attempt to cancel and correct the execution of hastily initiated errors. Crucially, analyses of performance in posterror trials showed that both the correct response and the erroneous response from the previous error trial were more active than the neutral response. These novel findings suggest that response-specific processes explain critical aspects of posterror performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Theories on human action control assume the human mind copes with the computational challenge of selecting and performing goal-directed movements by recycling previous action plans. Feature binding assists this recycling by integrating stimulus and response features into episodic representations. Perhaps surprisingly, however, previous evidence for binding and retrieval is confined to categorical perceptual and motor features that define coarse-grained decisions. Here we show that such episodic representations can also incorporate continuous, metric information. These conclusions emerge from two experiments in which participants performed whole-arm pointing movements to varying target locations with their left or right hand. Short inter-trial distances between successive locations benefitted response repetitions (i.e., responding with the same hand in consecutive trials) whereas increasing distances benefitted response changes. This effect emerged as a direct function of metric distance. Feature binding and retrieval thus seem to go beyond categorical decision making, either by including metric information about current stimulation or by providing direct access to an agent’s motor repertoire.

Perceptual and action representations consist of multiple independent features such as color and location of an encountered stimulus, or effector and direction of a performed action. Performing an action further establishes bindings between perceptual and action features, so that reencountering one feature retrieves all bound features. When errors are committed, both erroneous and correct responses are usually strongly represented. In Experiment 1, we investigated the binding between erroneous responses and their effects for different types of errors, with the goal of replicating and generalizing a previous single finding. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether perceptual features bind to correct or erroneous responses depending on whether they appear before or after response execution. These bindings had so far been studied separately. Participants categorized letters via key-press responses, and an irrelevant sound was played after their response (Exp. 1 and 2) or before (Exp. 2 only). Then the same or another sound was played, signaling participants to spontaneously choose a response. After an error in the letter task, participants chose the previous erroneous response more often when the sound was repeated than when it was changed. Surprisingly, neither the error type nor the timing of the sound relative to the response modulated this preference. Thus, the data unanimously support binding and retrieval between perceptual features and erroneous responses. Whether and how binding and retrieval also emerge for the nonexecuted correct response, however, seems to depend on contextual factors and might not be as ubiquitous as has been suggested before.

The ideomotor principle holds that actions can be initiated by anticipating their perceptual effects. While recent work suggests that effect anticipations rely on transitions rather than end-states, this has been shown only for visual effects. Here, we extended present approaches by investigating tactile effects. In two experiments, keypresses stopped vibrations on either the same (transition-compatible) or opposite (transition-incompatible) key, and we varied the task relevance of these effects. In Experiment 1 (task-irrelevant effects), compatibility influenced neither response times nor error rates. In Experiment 2 (task-relevant effects), response times were still not significantly influenced, but the error rates provided subtle evidence for transitional representations of tactile action effects. Our results not only challenge the predominant assumption of state-based effect representations but also provide insights for the temporal analysis of action effect structures and relate ideomotor learning to theories of optimal Bayesian integration.

In interactive tasks, agents often aim at eliciting a certain response from their partner. Not accomplishing this goal calls for adjusting behavior on the fly. Previous research suggests that such adjustments differ when interacting with a machine or with a fellow human agent. In this study, we investigated whether such differences are also reflected in event-related potentials induced by observing human and machine errors in an interactive setting. In a four-choice reaction time task, participants performed actions that were followed by regular and irregular visual effects. In different conditions, participants were led to believe that they were interacting with another human agent or with a machine so that the irregular effects were attributed either to human errors or to machine malfunctions. We compared observed-error-related negativity (oERN) and observed-error positivity (oPE) for these two error types. The oPE was not affected by the experimental manipulation, whereas the oERN amplitude was more pronounced for machine malfunctions than for human errors. This contradicts previous findings that reported behavioral and electrophysiological responses to errors being larger when they are committed by a human agent than if they are caused by machine malfunctions. Our results might suggest that automated systems are expected to operate predictably and, as a consequence, in interactive settings, errors committed by such systems are more salient and elicit a larger prediction error signal than if the same mistake is made by a human agent.

The error-related negativity (ERN) is a classic electrophysiological index of error detection. However, the present study challenges its classical functional interpretation by analyzing the ERN relative to the termination of erroneous actions (response offsets), a behavioral marker of error cancellation. Our findings reveal that the ERN reflects immediate auto-cancellation of ongoing erroneous behavior. Specifically, our findings corroborate that erroneous responses come with significantly shortened response durations (RDs) compared to correct responses, pointing to an immediate and active cancellation of ongoing motor activity. Crucially, ERN amplitude and latency varied with RDs, indicating that the ERN may reflect not only passive error detection but also the autonomous implementation of corrective behavior. These observations portray human performance monitoring as consisting of two components: a passive component related to detecting action slips, and an active component related to the implementation of behavioral changes. Moreover, these results carry important clinical implications. Abnormal ERN patterns observed in conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and Parkinson's disease may stem not solely from impaired error detection but from disrupted regulation and cancellation of erroneous actions. By integrating behavioral dynamics with electrophysiological measures, our study highlights the need to reconsider the functional significance of the ERN in both cognitive neuroscience and clinical contexts.

The Attention-Based View emphasizes that the social and material features of managerial situations have a crucial impact on the prioritization of issues and on how decision-makers select strategic answers to resolve these issues. This involves communication channels that guide the availability and salience of information in particular situations. One key situational feature of today's organizations is social media. Social media such as LinkedIn has a profound strategic impact on firms and increasingly shapes the context of strategy work. Yet, we still know little about how it affects individual managers and their situated attention. We conducted a preregistered experiment (N = 138) that simulated managerial LinkedIn use, as well as qualitative interviews (N = 18) with managers. We observed that the exposure to LinkedIn significantly influenced participants' strategic preferences. This effect remained stable when controlling for individual factors such as experience with strategy work and LinkedIn use, yet it strongly increased for senior-level managers, rendering these influences particularly meaningful for firm-level outcomes. Qualitative evidence suggests that this effect is due to the material reconfiguration of situated managerial attention driven by (1) the ubiquity of communication channels, (2) the consequential expansion of attentional boundaries, and (3) salience through emerging attention regulators. Together, our quantitative and qualitative findings advance the ABV by theorizing how LinkedIn materially reconfigures situated attention in today's strategy work.

Observations from multisensory body illusions indicate that the body representation can be adapted to changing task demands, e.g., it can be expanded to integrate external objects based on current sensorimotor experience (embodiment). While the mechanisms that promote embodiment have been studied extensively in earlier work, the opposite phenomenon of, removing an embodied entity from the body representation (i.e., disembodiment) has received little attention yet. The current study addressed this phenomenon and drew inspiration from the partial reinforcement extinction effect in instrumental learning which suggests that behavior is more resistant to extinction when reinforcement is delivered irregularly. In analogy to this, we investigated whether experiencing occasional visuo-motor mismatches during the induction phase of the moving rubber hand illusion (intermittent condition) would result in slower disembodiment as compared to a regular induction phase where motor and visual signals always match (continuous condition). However, we did not find an effect of reinforcement schedule on disembodiment. Keeping a recently embodied entity in the body schema, therefore, requires constant updating through correlated perceptual and motor signals.

How are body movements represented? While research suggests that movements are selected and initiated by anticipating their perceptual effects, the representational content of these anticipated effects remains underspecified. Specifically, it is unknown whether effect anticipations represent desired perceptual end states or intended perceptual changes leading to these end states. Here, we introduced a novel method to distinguish between the two representational contents and applied it in three preregistered experiments. Our results consistently favored transitional codes, indicating that the mind represents and controls body movements through the perceptual changes that they reliably produce. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

As a global community, humankind stands before a monumental challenge: to change our behavioral habits toward a more sustainable way of life. There are multiple paths toward that challenge, one of which is motivating citizens to engage in more pro-environmental behavior in everyday life. In this series of experiments (N = 521 participants), we pioneer a new paradigm that simulates everyday decision making via narrative-interactive choice elements to evaluate motivating strategies with a specific focus on sense of agency (SoA), that is, perceived control. To this end, we first characterize different individual motivators in fostering pro-environmental behavior. Further, in an experimental approach, we implement prompt variants into the narrative-interactive choice elements paradigm (color coding of choices vs. information on choice consequences) aligned with different aspects of SoA formation to test how SoA might facilitate pro-environmental decisions. Our results demonstrate that increased SoA is associated with pro-environmental behavior and showcase how prompt variants during decision making may affect pro-environmental behavior. Moreover, our results demonstrate a strong association of the participants' attitude toward environmental protection with SoA and pro-environmental behavior. SoA has been identified as a crucial aspect of action motivation; the present study provides compelling evidence that optimizing SoA may provide a much-needed strategy in fostering sustainability behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Models of performance monitoring hold that following an error, the early postresponse period is devoted primarily to error detection rather than mitigation. However, recent evidence shows that erroneous actions can be terminated within ∼100 ms of their initiation. Prior demonstrations of such error cancellation are based on rapid action slips that emerge in highly over-learned tasks, leaving open the question whether error cancellation generalizes to other types of errors. Here, we probed for the generality of the error cancellation effect by studying medium-speed errors that arise from the incorrect application of a mapping rule in the early stages of implementing a novel instruction. Reanalyses of three publicly available datasets show that error cancellation indeed extends to such errors. Swift error cancellation, therefore, is a remarkably general and automatic component of human performance monitoring.

Rules are deeply ingrained in our cognition. The current study investigates the influence of rule breaking on explicit sense of agency as well as the implicit perceptual illusion of temporal binding. Participants completed a free choice task that involved following or breaking a predetermined rule. The task required pressing a key that matched to a visual stimulus which triggered a corresponding change after a delay. Participants estimated the delay as an index of temporal binding. The results showed similar levels of explicit agency for rule following and breaking. Temporal binding, by contrast, was indeed influenced by rule breaking; however, the relationship is complex. Specifically, participants had smaller interval estimates for rule following vs. breaking at the 100 ms delay, likely reflecting cognitive conflict during rule breaking, whereas this effect reversed for the 400 ms and 700 ms delays. We interpret our results in relation to the wider rule breaking and temporal binding literature.

It is an open question how prevented events are represented in the human cognitive system-are they represented like produced events or are they represented in a different format? Here, we propose that seemingly contradictory observations on this question can be unified by assuming different time courses for production and prevention actions. Evidence from two experiments in the anticipatory saccades paradigm supported this model. Specifically, our results suggest that prevented events might be represented like produced events during action selection and execution, whereas their representation dissolves rapidly during action monitoring. In other words, the representation of prevented events reflects a two-step process: An initial affirmative representation is followed by later negation. Preregistrations, data, and analysis scripts for all experiments are available online ( https://osf.io/m3veh/ ).

Innovative products and services promise to improve our lives in many ways. Novel, unfamiliar approaches, however, also come with increased uncertainty regarding their feasibility and quality. In four preregistered experiments, we investigated implicit biases toward such innovative approaches. We tracked hand movements while participants chose between options of different levels of innovativeness. Choices either compared historic versus contemporary options (past comparison; e.g., carriage vs. car) or they compared contemporary versus innovative options (future comparison; e.g., car vs. self-driving car). While for past comparisons, movement trajectories were systematically torn toward the more historic option, the opposite effect was observed for future comparisons. This pattern of results replicated across all four studies. People, thus, seem to implicitly favor innovative and historic approaches over established ones. We conclude that moderate incongruity from an established approach, either through innovation or through a return to the past, evokes particular interest and attraction toward non-standard alternatives.

Establishing causal beliefs by observing regularities between actions and events in the environment is a crucial part of goal-directed behavior. Sense of agency (SoA) describes the corresponding experience of generating and controlling actions and subsequent events. Investigating how SoA adapts to situational changes in action-effect contingency, we observed even singular disturbances of perfect action-effect contingencies to yield a striking impact on SoA formation. Moreover, we additionally included disturbances of regularity that are not directly linked to one's own actions. Doing so allowed us to investigate how SoA might be a concept that goes beyond own actions toward a more generalized, subjective representation of control regarding environmental events. Indeed, the present experiments establish that, while SoA is highly tuned toward action-effect relations, it is also sensitive to events that occur without one's own action contribution. SoA thus appears to be exceptionally sensitive to singular breakpoints of perfect control with agents disproportionally incorporating such events during SoA formation while at the same time building on a rich situation model.

Abstract: Anticipating to be imitated by another agent primes corresponding action plans in action models. Here we assessed whether being imitated by more than one coactor boosts anticipated imitation. This prediction was based on corresponding findings from motor priming by perceiving rather than anticipating movements of multiple agents. In contrast to this previous work, the effects of anticipated imitation were similar for imitation by a single agent and joint imitation by two agents. Anticipated imitation, therefore, appears to be based on sparse representations of only selected features rather than including a full representation of all possible consequences of one's own movements.