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 of sensorimotor processes and the contribution of retrospective inferences based on contextual cues. In the current study, we recruited western and non-western participants and examined the effect of pleasantness of action outcomes on both feeling of control ratings and intentional binding which refers to the perceived compression of the temporal delay between actions and outcomes. We found that both western and non-western groups showed greater feeling of control ratings for the consonant (pleasant) compared to dissonant (unpleasant) outcomes. The intentional binding effect, on the other hand, was stronger for the consonant compared to dissonant outcomes in the western group only. We discuss the results in relation to how cultural background might differentially influence the effect of outcome pleasantness on low and high levels of the sense of agency.