2026/04/23 by Marta Gerosa, Patrick Haggard, Arno Villringer +1 · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Medicine · #Free Will and Agency #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/qzs6j_v1
Interoceptive rhythms have been shown to shape when we act, with voluntary actions clustering in specific cardio-respiratory phases. Whether these phase-dependent biases also influence sense of agency (SoA), the feeling of controlling one’s actions and their outcomes, remains unclear. In a preregistered study (N = 46), we combined intentional binding with continuous cardio-respiratory recordings to examine phase-dependent modulation of action and tone binding. Actions preferentially clustered during early systole and mid-expiration, replicating prior work. Action binding, indexing agency over actions themselves, was unaffected by cardio-respiratory phase. Conversely, tone binding, indexing agency over outcomes, was enhanced when tones occurred during inspiration, particularly in combination with diastole. Exploratory analyses showed that individuals whose actions tended to align such that tones occurred during systole exhibited weaker tone binding. These findings suggest that cardio-respiratory rhythms gate when we act and selectively influence retrospective agency attribution, without affecting the prospective feeling of control over actions.