I have just recently submitted the last version for publication of a new paper, together with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Marieke Rohde: Defining Agency. Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry and Spatio-temporality in Action, to be published soon on a special issue on Agency edited by Mareke Rohde and Takashi Ikegami on Adaptive Behavior journal.
ABSTRACT: The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavy-weighted terms like “intentionality”, “rationality” or “mind”. However, most of the available definitions of agency are either too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: a) a system must define its own individuality, b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry) and c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable to meet the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook to the road that lies ahead in the pursuit to understand, model and synthesize agents.
KEYWORDS: Agency, individuality, interactional asymmetry, normativity, spatiality, temporality.
Xabier E. Barandiaran 
Spatio-temporal relationships are what I call the «Hominin Narrative Faculty’ is all about: with decoupled mental representations (imaginations) of Self and Other agents acting in elsewhere and elsewhen frames. I think we are on same track.