Assessing the Relationship between Sense of Agency, the Bodily-Self and Stress: Four Virtual-Reality Experiments in Healthy Individuals

Abstract

The bodily-self, our experience of being a body, arises from the interaction of several processes. For example, embodied Sense of Agency (SoA), the feeling of controlling our body’s actions, is a fundamental facet of the bodily-self. SoA is disturbed in psychosis, with stress promoting its inception. However, there is little knowledge regarding the relationship between SoA, stress, and other facets of the bodily-self. In four experiments manipulating embodied SoA using a virtual hand (VH), we examined (1) How is embodied SoA related to other facets of the bodily-self?; and (2) How is SoA impacted by stress? We found that increased alteration of the VH significantly decreased subjective ratings of SoA and body ownership (Exp. 1), supporting the close relation between SoA and body ownership. Interoceptive accuracy and SoA were positively correlated (Exp. 3), connecting awareness to one’s actions and cardiac signals. Contrary to our expectations, SoA was not related to trait anxiety (Exp. 3), nor did induced stress impair SoA (Exp. 4). Finally, we found a negative correlation between self-reported prodromal symptoms and SoA. These results strongly support the connection between SoA and the bodily-self. Whereas, SoA was not impaired by stress, and weakly related to psychotic symptoms.

Judgments of agency are affected by sensory noise without recruiting metacognitive processing

“…Beyond the sensory noise manipulation, our results should also be considered in the context of the particular agency rating scale we used, as this will constrain participants' rating behaviour. Similar agency scales are used in other agency research 5,6,33,[49][50][51][52][53][54] , so the results presented here are relevant to understand the computations of agency ratings discussed in the existing literature, to the extent that they are based on similar experimental operationalizations. In light of this, although our agency-rating task differs from our confidence task and does not include any postdecisional component, which could be argued to underlie the differences in metacognitive processing, our results still suggest that the type of agency judgments measured in the literature do not indicate metacognitive processing, whether or not this is due to a lack of postdecisional ratings.…”

“…The use of 2IFC agency tasks with confidence has recently been proposed as a promising step towards a more reliable and complete investigation of agency processing, both in healthy and clinical populations 25 . Here, using a virtual hand we extended this approach into a more proximal form of embodied agency, closer to agency over the body itself 33,[40][41][42] , and provide an initial step in demonstrating that participants can meaningfully monitor the accuracy of these agency decisions. We suggest that confidence judgments about agency should be considered as the metacognitive level of an agency processing hierarchy, with agency judgments as explicit first-order judgments.…”

“…Here, using a virtual hand we extended this approach into a more proximal form of embodied agency, closer to agency over the body itself (M.S. Christensen & Grünbaum, 2018;Dogge et al, 2019;Stern et al, 2020;Wen, 2019), and provide an initial step in demonstrating that participants can meaningfully monitor the accuracy of these agency decisions. We suggest that confidence judgments about agency should be considered as the metacognitive level of an agency processing hierarchy, with agency judgments as explicit first-order judgments.…”

“…The tasks we used built on a paradigm in which participants see on the screen a virtual hand that follows the movement of their own, with a given temporal lag 32 . This paradigm allowed us to examine a situation closer to the more proximal or 'narrow' sense of agency that relates to control of the body itself 33,40,41 . Each participant completed two tasks: a confidence-rating task (Fig.…”

“…This paradigm allowed us to examine a situation closer to the more embodied or 'narrow' sense of agency that relates to control of the body itself (M.S. Christensen & Grünbaum, 2018;Dogge et al, 2019;Stern et al, 2020). Each participant completed two tasks: a confidence-rating task (Fig.…”