Am I in Control? Explicit and Implicit Sense of Agency in Depersonalisation Experiences

The sense of agency, the feeling of controlling one’s bodily actions and the world is altered in Depersonalisation (DP), a condition that makes people feel detached from one’s self and body. To investigate the link between depersonalization and both implicit and explicit sense of agency, an online study was conducted using the influential Intentional Binding paradigm in a sample of non-clinical DP participants. The results did nor reveal significant differences between individuals with low and high occurrences of DP experiences on implicit and explicit sense of agency. However, participants with high occurences of DP experiences showed a more time-sensitive explicit sense of agency and greater temporal distortions for short intervals in the absence of self-initiated motion. This suggests that there is a discrepancy between implicit and explicit sense of agency in people with high levels of depersonalization. Altogether, these findings call for further investigations of the key role of time perception on altered sense of self and agency in both non-clinical and clinical population, in order to disentangle the mechanisms associated with explicit and implicit sense of agency.