Automation Technology and Sense of Control: A Window on Human Agency Bruno Berberian1*, Jean-Christophe Sarrazin1, Patrick Le Blaye1, Patrick Haggard2 1 Systems Control and Flight Dynamics Department, ONERA, Toulouse, France, 2 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, United Kingdom Abstract Previous studies have shown that the perceived times of voluntary actions and their effects are perceived as shifted towards each other, so that the interval between action and outcome seems shortened. This has been referred to as ‘intentional binding’ (IB). However, the generality of this effect remains unclear. Here we demonstrate that Intentional Binding also occurs in complex control situations. Using an aircraft supervision task with different autopilot settings, our results first indicated a strong relation between measures of IB and different levels of system automation. Second, measures of IB were related to explicit agency judgement in this applied setting. We discuss the implications for the underlying mechanisms, and for sense of agency in automated environments. Citation: Berberian B, Sarrazin J-C, Le Blaye P, Haggard P (2012) Automation Technology and Sense of Control: A Window on Human Agency. PLoS ONE 7(3): e34075. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0034075 Editor: Manos Tsakiris, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom Received December 5, 2011; Accepted February 21, 2012; Published March 30, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Berberian et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: bruno.berberian@onera.fr Introduction Automation and feeling of control We live in an increasingly technological world. Automated systems certainly can make life easier, but can also create complexity and uncertainty. For example, the important role of automation aids in aviation can lead pilots to the following important question: ‘‘who is in control now?’’ [1]. More particularly, the interposition of more and more automation between pilot and aircraft tends to distance pilots from many details of the flying, decreasing their feeling of control [2]. Measuring the feeling of control may be important in evaluating different automated devices, and may also be relevant to evaluating pilot performance. It follows that better measurement and psychological understanding of the human sense of control could contribute to better automatic system design. On the other hand, studying complex control situations, like human interactions with automated devices, may improve our under- standing of cognitive mechanisms that underlie the feeling of control. Quantifying human agency When we act, we usually have a clear feeling that we control our own action and can thus produce effects in the external environment. This feeling has been described as ‘‘the sense of agency’’ [3], and is recognised as an important part of normal and human consciousness. However, the sense of agency has proved difficult to quantify, and its basis and limits remain unclear. Central to the sense of agency is temporal contiguity between one’s action and the resultant effects [4–6]. Interestingly, the reverse seems also true: human intentional actions produce systematic changes in time perception. In particular, the interval between a voluntary action and an outcome is perceived as shorter than the interval between a physically similar involuntary movement and the same outcome event. This phenomenon, called intentional binding [7], may provide an implicit window into human agency. Intentional binding has been widely reported [8–14]. Several questions remain about the factors that produce a sense of agency. For example, agency comes by degrees: one can feel more or less in control. This variation is particularly clear when using machines. The feeling of control varies quite subtly as the relation between operator inputs and machine response [2], [15], [16]. However, previous tasks relied either on explicit binary judgements of agency vs. non-agency in self-other discrimination paradigms [17], or on contrasting binding between entirely voluntary and entirely involuntary situations [7]. Finally, interac- tions with complex machinery are clearly one area where sense of agency is important, but may be difficult to achieve: surprisingly no study, as far as we know, has investigated sense of agency in such applied settings. We therefore explored sense of agency in a complex setting involving flying an aircraft with various degrees of autopilot assistance. Using both implicit (intentional binding) and explicit (verbal reports) measures of agency, we demonstrate that degree of automation influences both measures. Our results validate intentional binding as a measure of sense of agency, identify the conditions for experiencing agency in automation settings, and suggest new measures for quantifying human experience of control over critical machinery. Methods Ethics Statement All participants signed a written declaration of informed consent. The procedure was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, but no specific ethical approval was obtained considering that ONERA has no Institutional Review Board. PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 March 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 3 | e34075