Agency and Embodiment Provide Dissociable Benefits to Perception, Metacognition and Neural Processing During Active Sensing
This study demonstrates that while agency broadly enhances perceptual accuracy, metacognitive sensitivity, and neural processing during active auditory search, physical embodiment uniquely provides the specific benefit of anchoring both neural responses and confidence judgments to immediate sensory evidence.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of a preprint that has not been peer-reviewed. It is not medical advice. Do not make health decisions based on this content. Read full disclaimer
We live in a world where we often receive information passively, scrolling through screens or listening to broadcasts without moving a muscle. Yet, for most of our evolutionary history, understanding our surroundings required active effort. We turned our heads, walked toward sounds, and reached out to touch objects. This active engagement does more than just gather data; it shapes how we trust what we perceive. Scientists call this ability to judge the reliability of our own senses "metacognition." It is the internal voice that tells us, "I am sure I heard that," or "I might be wrong." While we know that moving our bodies to explore the world improves our ability to hear and see, it has remained unclear whether the simple act of controlling our own attention is enough to sharpen this self-judgment, or if we need the full physical experience of moving through space to truly ground our confidence in reality.
A team of researchers set out to untangle these two forces: the power of being the author of one's own actions, and the power of physically embodying those actions. They designed an experiment where twenty people searched for a specific sound hidden among several others. The participants faced three different scenarios. In the first, they walked around a room, using their own body movements to locate the hidden sound source. In the second, they sat still in a chair and used a computer mouse to move a cursor on a screen, which controlled the same sound search. In the third, they simply listened to recordings of the sound sequences they had generated in the second scenario, having no control over the flow of information. Throughout these tasks, the researchers monitored the participants' brain activity using a mobile headset that recorded electrical signals, allowing them to see how the brain responded to the sounds in real time.
The results revealed a clear distinction between the benefits of control and the benefits of physical movement. When people were in charge of the search, whether they were walking or just moving a mouse, their ability to find the target sound improved significantly compared to when they just listened passively. More importantly, their ability to judge how sure they were about their findings also became sharper. They were better at distinguishing between times they were right and times they were wrong. This suggests that the simple fact of being the one to direct the search is what boosts both hearing and self-awareness. The physical act of walking did not provide an extra boost to these basic performance metrics; the control itself was the key driver.
However, the story changed when the researchers looked deeper into how the brain processed the information and how confidence was formed. While both active conditions improved performance, only the condition where people walked around their environment anchored their confidence to the immediate moment. When participants moved their bodies, their sense of certainty was tied directly to the sound they were hearing right then. Their confidence did not get stuck on the outcome of the previous trial. In contrast, when people searched using a mouse on a screen, their confidence was influenced by whether they had been right or wrong on the very last attempt. Their self-evaluation was slightly detached from the present moment, lingering on past results.
This difference was also visible in the brain signals. The researchers found that when people walked, the brain's response to the target sound grew stronger whenever the person felt highly confident. This link between a strong neural reaction and a feeling of certainty happened only during the embodied search. When people used the mouse, this connection was missing; their brain responses did not fluctuate with their confidence levels in the same way. The study shows that while taking control of our senses improves our general performance, physically moving through the world does something unique: it ties our internal sense of certainty directly to the sensory evidence at hand, filtering out the noise of past experiences.
These findings offer a new perspective on how we interact with technology and how we might design future intelligent systems. As we spend more time gathering information through screens, we may be losing a crucial link between our actions and our self-trust. The research suggests that true reliability in self-monitoring comes from a closed loop where our movements, our senses, and our judgments are all physically connected in the present moment. For artificial intelligence to develop a similarly reliable sense of its own capabilities, it may need more than just virtual control; it may require a form of physical grounding that keeps its confidence tethered to the immediate reality it perceives.
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