Agency and Embodiment Provide Dissociable Benefits to Perception, Metacognition and Neural Processing During Active Sensing
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Metacognition, judging how reliable our own perceptual decisions are, is central to adaptive behavior. Such judgments hinge on the reliability of the sensory evidence on which that decision is based, and active sensing through self-directed exploration is known to improve perception itself. Yet, how agency, the authorship over self-initiated actions, and the processing of the sensory consequences, which is implicit to active sensing, modulate metacognition and its calibration, remains unknown. Whether physical embodiment adds to this beyond virtual exploration is similarly unclear, yet relevant both for daily life and for self-monitoring in agentic AI. Here, we combined a naturalistic auditory search paradigm with mobile electroencephalography. Twenty participants performed a target-detection task under three conditions: active embodied exploration, active screen-based exploration, and passive listening to replays of their own trials, while we obtained steady-state auditory evoked potentials (SSAEPs) to characterize stimulus-locked neural responses. We find that both agency conditions improved accuracy, metacognitive sensitivity, and overall SSAEP amplitude relative to passive listening, indicating that agency, rather than whole-body movement, drives these enhancements. Crucially, however, embodiment uniquely grounded both the target-evoked neural response and the subjects’ confidence to immediate sensory evidence. Thus, agency alone broadly enhances perceptual and neural processing, but embodiment specifically anchors confidence, neurally and behaviorally, to the present. Significance Statement How well we judge the reliability of our perception, called metacognitive sensitivity, matters more than ever, as we increasingly are presented with information passively through screens rather than gathering it actively via self-initiated exploration. Does actively seeking information sharpen self-monitoring, and does the medium (body vs. screen) matter? We show that active search enhances metacognitive sensitivity and brain responses alike, whether embodied or screen-based. Only embodied search, however, anchors self-evaluation to the present: Behaviorally, embodiment facilitates coupling of confidence tracking directly to current evidence rather than the previous trial’s outcome, while neuronally, it enhances responses in frontal brain regions during periods of heightened subjective confidence. This embodied grounding of self-monitoring may prove pivotal for building reliably agentic AI systems.
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G1558457954, G8561723842
OpenAlex ID: W7222342308