Beyond one's body parts: Remote object movement with sense of agency involuntarily biases spatial attention.

Humans' own body postures and/or actions bias visual attention. This study examined whether an object controlled remotely with a sense of agency (SoA) can bias attentional allocation, even if the mappings of body movement and object movement do not correspond (i.e., with a less extended body representation). In the experiments, participants shifted a circle toward an instructed direction via keypress. On some trials, the task changed to identification of visual characters instead of the circle shift. Strength of SoA was manipulated based on the probability that the circle actually moved to the participant's intended location, with high probability producing a strong SoA. Results showed that visual identification performance became higher for appearance of the target at the intended location than at the unintended location, but only when observers felt a strong SoA. This suggests that the object's movement attracts attention when the observer feels a strong SoA over its control.