The impact of response conflict and dysfluent processing on cognitive control and sense of agency

Voluntary action is typically associated with a sense of agency, the experience of being in control of our actions and their consequences. Experiencing conflict during action selection has been shown to reduce our sense of agency, highlighting a role for metacognitive monitoring of action. Yet, it remains unclear whether there is a common metacognitive system involved in monitoring different types of disruptions of action selection, which might similarly influence the sense of agency. Therefore, we compared the impact of disrupting action selection through response conflict (incongruent flankers) and dysfluent visual processing (masked stimuli). Although the two disruptions require differential cognitive control recruitment, they were matched in their cost on action selection. Both manipulations also resulted in a similar reduction in agency ratings, suggesting some common monitoring of difficulty during action selection. In a second study, we replicated most of these behavioural effects, while also collecting fMRI data. Results show some commonalities in the neural networks involved in task performance, but also distinct regions monitoring different types of disruption, with implications for proactive cognitive control.