Where is your intention?

The sense of authorship we experience in coacting situations illustrates the numerous cues we must avail ourselves of to make an ostensibly effortless judgment. This research was undertaken to better understand the processing that occurs when we ascribe authorship of actions to the self, and how such ascriptions become more complicated when we are acting in concert with another. My general hypothesis in this research was that the order of action and gaze in situations involving coactors has significant effects on the judgment of action authorship. In Experiment 1, participants rated authorship for their own movement when coacting with an experimenter who was performing the same observable action, or with an experimenter who was simply providing the movement with their gaze. In Experiment 2, participants rated authorship over both their own movement and over the movement of the experimenter. Participants' movements were either observable actions or simple gaze movements. In Experiment 3, participant and experimenter were separated by a one-way mirror, so that participants knew that their movements could not be seen by the experimenter. In Experiment 4, participants sat on the other side of the one-way mirror so that they knew the experimenter's intended position, but the actual action was invisible to them. In addition, whether feeling like a leader or follower influenced the participant's ascription of authorship traits was also explored. In Experiment 5, participants were tested for an autism quotient, with the expectation that participants who were more (sub-clinically) autistic in their functioning would be less impacted by the coacting situation in their ratings of authorship. These studies offer evidence for a role of intention cues as social indicators for authorship processing in coaction and suggest that intention cues are a primary social indicator for parsing authorship, even more informative than the presence of an action itself. These experiments, taken together, suggest that the authorship experience is highly sensitive to relatively minor variations in the social context of a simple action. Participants reported a change in their experience of authorship when acting with another person, an experience which was impacted by the actor's relative positions.