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Abstract:
The experience of oneself as an agent not only results from interactions with the inanimate environment, but often takes
place in a social context. Interactions with other people have been suggested to play a key role in the construal of selfagency.
Here, we investigated the influence of social interactions on sensory attenuation of action effects as a marker of prereflective
self-agency. To this end, we compared the attenuation of the perceived loudness intensity of auditory action
effects generated either by oneself or another person in either an individual, non-interactive or interactive action context. In
line with previous research, the perceived loudness of self-generated sounds was attenuated compared to sounds
generated by another person. Most importantly, this effect was strongly modulated by social interactions between self and
other. Sensory attenuation of self- and other-generated sounds was increased in interactive as compared to the respective
individual action contexts. This is the first experimental evidence suggesting that pre-reflective self-agency can extend to
and is shaped by interactions between individuals.
