Internal motor cues are also an indicator in deciding whether an action occurred through self-agency, and can be measured by the generation of movement.
Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel[1] conducted a seminal work on the perception of external causal events.
[citation needed] Work on attribution of agency to oneself, however, began with Benjamin Libet's conclusion that brain activity predictive of action precedes conscious awareness of the intention to act,[2][3] which was later refuted (Neuroscience of free will).
Sense of agency, on this view, is a product of fallible post hoc inference rather than infallible direct access to one's conscious force of will.
For instance, actions are perceived as temporally shifted towards their effects when they are performed volitionally, but not when involuntarily evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation.
[6] This distortion of the perceived interval between movement and effect is known as intentional binding and is considered an implicit measure of the sense of agency.
The presence of other potential causes in temporal and spatial proximity to the event will, all else being equal, result in a diminished sense of self-agency.
[12] Hindriks et al. in 2011 have proposed a computational Bayesian inference model of self-attribution of agency that deals mainly with the exclusivity dimension.
[14] Ebert and Wegner in 2010 also showed that manipulating consistency enhanced both judgments of self-authorship and temporal binding between cause and effect.
[23][d] Moore, Lagnado, Deal and Haggard in 2009 investigated whether statistical contingency alone could explain both predictive and inferential postdictive intentional binding effects.
[24] Although predictive and postdictive accounts of agency are often cast as competitors, they may in fact be reconcilable when attributions of self-agency are viewed within the framework of cognition under uncertainty.
In particular, a comparator model based on efference copy can be seen as a more sophisticated way of characterizing Wegner's consistency parameter and the computations that are likely to be a part of it.