Atypical implicit and explicit sense of agency in autism: A complete characterization using the cue integration approach.
Autistic adults feel less connection between what they do and what happens next, both at gut and conscious levels.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lafleur and colleagues asked autistic and neurotypical adults to press a key that made a tone happen after a short delay.
The team measured two things: how much the adults unconsciously felt the press and tone were linked (intentional binding) and how they rated who caused the tone when they added visual cues.
This gave a full picture of both gut-level and conscious sense of agency.
What they found
Autistic adults showed no intentional binding; they did not feel the action and tone were glued together in time.
They also used the extra visual cues differently when judging who caused the tone, showing their conscious agency sense was off track.
Neurotypical adults showed normal binding and cue use.
How this fits with other research
Sperduti et al. (2014) saw the same missing binding eleven years earlier, so the new study is a solid replication with added explicit tests.
Nobusako et al. (2020) found a wider time window for agency in children with developmental coordination disorder, hinting that timing problems cross diagnoses but show up in different ways.
Hopkins et al. (2011) caught stiff, jerky gait in autistic kids, supporting the idea that sensorimotor integration is shaky across the lifespan.
Why it matters
If your client seems unaware that their action caused an outcome, do not assume defiance; the internal link may simply be weak.
Try giving extra visual or auditory cues right after a response and ask, "Did you make that happen?" to train the agency feeling.
Clear, immediate feedback could help bridge the gap their brain does not close on its own.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
There exist indications that sense of agency (SoA), the experience of being the cause of one’s own actions and actions’ outcomes, is altered in autism. However, no studies in autism have simultaneously investigated the integration mechanisms underpinning both implicit and explicit SoA, the two levels of agency proposed by the innovative cue integration approach. Our study establishes a first complete characterization of SoA functioning in autism, by comparing age- and IQ-matched samples of autistic versus neurotypical adults. Intentional binding and judgments of agency were used to assess implicit and explicit SoA over pinching movements with visual outcomes. Sensorimotor and contextual cues were manipulated using feedback alteration and induced belief about the cause of actions’ outcome. Implicit SoA was altered in autism, as showed by an overall abolished intentional binding effect and greater inter-individual heterogeneity. At the explicit level, we observed under-reliance on retrospective sensorimotor cues. The implicit-explicit dynamic was also altered in comparison to neurotypical individuals. Our results show that both implicit and explicit levels of SoA, as well as the dynamic between the two levels, present atypicalities in autism.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006), 2025 · doi:10.1177/17470218241311582