| Summary: | <p>Understanding agency – the extent to which actions control outcomes – is crucial for comprehending human behaviour and mental health, particularly in major depressive disorder where reduced agency is a key symptom. This thesis investigates how individuals perceive action-outcome contingencies in multi-agent environments, shedding light on individual differences in the acquisition and potential loss of agency perception.</p>
<p>Research shows that individuals tend to perceive positive action-outcome relations when both action and outcome are present, and these relations are weakened when only one occurs. However, people often neglect events where neither action nor outcome occurs, despite their logical relevance in informing positive relations. This thesis examines whether such co-absence events become more salient when other potential causes are present.</p>
<p>Experiments 1-3 examined contingency learning by manipulating the frequency and content of co-absence events. Results revealed that increasing co-absence events reduced perceived contingency, especially when filled with irrelevant stimuli. Participants with higher depressive symptoms demonstrated less sensitivity to these events and reported weaker contingencies overall, notably for negative (inhibitory) relations.</p>
<p>Experiments 4-6 extended these findings to agency perception in multi-agent contexts. Depressed participants perceived lower agency for themselves and others, again, especially in scenarios involving negative relations. Non-depressed participants exhibited a bias where perceiving more control in one agent led to attributing opposing control to another, a bias less evident in depressed participants as they tended to attribute control to the other agent in the same direction.</p>
<p>Behavioural differences emerged: depressed participants engaged in more frequent but aimless actions, while non-depressed participants’ actions were fewer but more goal-directed. When assisted in tracking the number of outcomes produced, depressed participants’ actions became more goal-directed and less frequent.</p>
<p>These findings provide valuable insights into agency perception mechanisms, with potential implications for informing interventions. While acknowledging limitations, the methodology and results from these studies establish a foundation for future research in this critical area of mental health and human behaviour.</p>
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