Cultural background influences implicit but not explicit sense of agency for the production of musical tones

The sense of agency is suggested to occur at both low and high levels by the involvement ofsensorimotor processes and the contribution of retrospective inferences based on contex-tual cues. In the current study, we recruited western and non-western participants andexamined the effect of pleasantness of action outcomes on both feeling of control ratingsand intentional binding which refers to the perceived compression of the temporal delaybetween actions and outcomes. We found that both western and non-western groupsshowed greater feeling of control ratings for the consonant (pleasant) compared to disso-nant (unpleasant) outcomes. The intentional binding effect, on the other hand, was stron-ger for the consonant compared to dissonant outcomes in the western group only. Wediscuss the results in relation to how cultural background might differentially influencethe effect of outcome pleasantness on low and high levels of the sense of agency.