Sense of agency and recognition memory: A replication of Hon and Yeo (2021)

Hon and Yeo (2021) demonstrated that word recognition (i.e., “hit” responses) is facilitated when words are presented within a moving box whose motion is triggered by a participant’s voluntary keypress. We will conduct a replication study to examine the reproducibility of the findings from their Experiment 2, which employed essentially the same methodology as Experiment 1 and yielded comparable results, but was implemented with improved experimental control. In their Experiment 2, a box moved upward or downward either in a direction corresponding to, or opposite from, the participant’s action (an upward or downward keypress), with either a minimal (100 ms) or longer (900 ms) temporal delay. After the box reached its destination, a word was presented inside the box. This “action” task was followed by a surprise recognition test for the words. Temporal and spatial congruency were manipulated to modulate the sense of agency over the visual feedback. Under conditions of spatial congruency and minimal delay, both the rated sense of agency and recognition performance (i.e., hit rate) were higher than in conditions with incongruent and/or delayed feedback, suggesting that an enhanced sense of agency may improve recognition memory. Our previous study (Tsuji & Imaizumi, 2022) failed to show any improvement in recognition memory for word stimuli (i.e., feedback of voluntary action) as a result of action–feedback congruence, although the rated sense of agency was successfully manipulated. However, our experimental task and design were not sufficiently comparable to Experiment 2 of Hon and Yeo (2021). Therefore, the present study aims to conduct a more direct replication of their findings using more closely matched experimental procedures.