Examining the sense of agency in human-computer interaction

Humans are agents, we feel that we control the course of events on our everyday life. This refers to the Sense of Agency (SoA). This experience is not only crucial in our daily life, but also in our interaction with technology. When we manipulate a user interface (e.g., computer, smartphone, etc.), we expect that the system responds to our input commands with feedback, as we desire to feel that we are in charge of the interaction. If this interplay elicits a SoA, then the user will perceive an instinctive feeling of “I am controlling this”. Although research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) pursuits the design of intuitive and responsive systems, most of the current studies have been focussed mainly on interaction techniques (e.g., software-hardware) and User Experience (UX) (e.g., comfort, usability, etc.), and very little has been investigated in terms of the SoA i.e., the conscious experience of being in control regarding the interaction. In this thesis, we present an experimental exploration of the role of the SoA in interaction paradigms typical of HCI. After two chapters of introduction and related work, we describe a series of studies that explore agency implication in interaction with systems through human senses such as vision, audio, touch and smell. Chapter 3 explores the SoA in mid-air haptic interaction through touchless actions. Then, Chapter 4 examines agency modulation through smell and its application for olfactory interfaces. Chapter 5 describes two novel timing techniques based on auditory and haptic cues that provide alternative timing methods to the traditional Libet clock. Finally, we conclude with a discussion chapter that highlights the importance of our SoA during interactions with technology as well as the implications of the results found, in the design of user interfaces

Agency in mid-air interfaces

Touchless interfaces allow users to view, control and manipulate digital content without physically touching an interface. They are being explored in a wide range of application scenarios from medical surgery to car dashboard controllers. One aspect of touchless interaction that has not been explored to date is the Sense of Agency (SoA). The SoA refers to the subjective experience of voluntary control over actions in the external world. In this paper, we investigated the SoA in touchless systems using the intentional binding paradigm. We first compare touchless systems with physical interactions and then augmented different types of haptic feedback to explore how different outcome modalities influence users’ SoA. From our experiments, we demonstrated that an intentional binding effect is observed in both physical and touchless interactions with no statistical difference. Additionally, we found that haptic and auditory feedback help to increase SoA compared with visual feedback in touchless interfaces. We discuss these findings and identify design opportunities that take agency into consideration

SmellControl: the study of sense of agency in smell

The Sense of Agency (SoA) is crucial in interaction with technology, it refers to the feeling of 'I did that' as opposed to 'the system did that' supporting a feeling of being in control. Research in human-computer interaction has recently studied agency in visual, auditory and haptic interfaces, however the role of smell on agency remains unknown. Our sense of smell is quite powerful to elicit emotions, memories and awareness of the environment, which has been exploited to enhance user experiences (e.g., in VR and driving scenarios). In light of increased interest in designing multimodal interfaces including smell and its close link with emotions, we investigated, for the first time, the effect of smell-induced emotions on the SoA. We conducted a study using the Intentional Binding (IB) paradigm used to measure SoA while participants were exposed to three scents with different valence (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral). Our results show that participants? SoA increased with a pleasant scent compared to neutral and unpleasant scents. We discuss how our results can inform the design of multimodal and future olfactory interfaces