Summary: A new study from the University of Tokyo shows that actively exploring how movements map to outcomes—motor exploration—is essential for developing a genuine sense of agency (SoA) when learning a new motor skill. Using a data glove to control a cursor, researchers found that early judgments of control depend mainly on timing between movement and feedback, but a true sense of agency grows only when learners actively discover the spatial rules that govern outcomes.
Participants who merely memorized gestures and their effects did not develop a robust feeling of control. These results shed light on how SoA emerges during de novo motor learning and have practical implications for rehabilitation, virtual reality, and human-computer interfaces.
Key Facts:
- Motor exploration is crucial: Actively discovering the relationship between actions and outcomes builds a stronger sense of agency than passive imitation.
- Timing vs. structure: Initial SoA judgments are driven by temporal synchrony, while deeper agency depends on learning the structural mapping between movement and effect.
- Applications for technology and health: These findings can inform design of VR, rehabilitation programs, and brain-machine interfaces by emphasizing exploratory training that helps form internal models.
Source: University of Tokyo
What is sense of agency?
Sense of agency (SoA) is the subjective feeling that one is causing or controlling body movements and events in the external world. Understanding how SoA develops is important not only for everyday behavior and well-being but also for designing interfaces and therapies that rely on users feeling in control.
Traditionally, SoA has been explained by the comparator model: the brain forms predictions about the sensory outcomes of actions (an internal model), and a match between prediction and actual feedback produces the feeling of agency. But a challenge arises when people learn entirely new motor mappings: before an internal model exists, outcomes are not predictable. Instead, learners often perform actions and observe the results—motor exploration—which gradually builds an internal model.
To examine how SoA develops from this pre-prediction stage, researchers at the University of Tokyo designed a de novo motor learning task. Participants wore a data glove that translated finger postures into cursor movements on a screen. The study comprised two experiments that contrasted active motor exploration with passive imitation.
In Experiment 1, participants learned a spatial hand-to-screen mapping through trial and error. At multiple stages of learning, the team measured participants’ sense of control over the cursor, including responses to small spatial or temporal distortions. Early in learning, participants judged control mainly by temporal contiguity—how synchronous their movements were with cursor motion. With practice, however, SoA increased for cursor movements that conformed to the learned spatial mapping, especially among participants who reached higher proficiency. In other words, as a structural internal model formed, agency judgments shifted from relying purely on timing to recognizing the learned spatial relationship between hand motions and cursor behavior.
Experiment 2 intentionally limited motor exploration: participants were shown gestures and asked to imitate them to move the cursor to targets, essentially memorizing gesture-to-position associations rather than discovering the mapping through trial and error. In this condition, participants did not show the same enhancement in SoA that emerged in Experiment 1. This contrast indicates that passive memorization of action-outcome pairs is insufficient to produce a strong, generalized sense of agency.
The authors describe the key development as forming a structural representation of the mapping—for example, learning that bending a particular finger moves the cursor to the right. That structural internal model, built through exploration, appears necessary for SoA to generalize beyond simple temporal synchrony.
These findings refine theoretical accounts of SoA by clarifying how the comparator process originates during learning and by highlighting motor exploration as the mechanism that builds the internal model underlying agency. Practically, the research suggests that training methods that promote active exploration—rather than rote imitation—may better support the recovery of motor control after injury and improve user experience in technologies that require intuitive action-outcome mappings.
Funding: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science grants JP23K12928, JP19H05725, JP21H03780, and JP24H00172.
About this motor learning research news
Author: Rohan Mehra
Source: University of Tokyo
Contact: Rohan Mehra – University of Tokyo
Image: Image credit: Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access. “Sense of agency for a new motor skill emerges via the formation of a structural internal model” by Takumi Tanaka et al., Communications Psychology. DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00240-7
Abstract
Sense of agency for a new motor skill emerges via the formation of a structural internal model
Sense of agency (SoA) refers to the feeling of controlling one’s body and the external environment. The traditional comparator model proposes that SoA arises when predicted and actual action outcomes match. However, when learning new motor skills, individuals start without reliable outcome predictions and must form an internal model of action-outcome mappings through trial and error—motor exploration.
Using a data glove task that required participants to learn a novel hand-to-screen mapping, the study measured SoA across learning stages. Initially, temporal contiguity between movement and feedback drove agency judgments. As participants explored and learned the spatial mapping, SoA increased for movements that followed the learned structure. When exploration was suppressed and participants simply imitated gestures, this development did not occur. The results emphasize the essential role of motor exploration in forming the structural internal models that underpin a robust sense of agency.