Looking for the agent: an investigation into consciousness of action and self-consciousness in schizophrenic patients

Abstract

Looking for the agent: an investigation into consciousness of action and self-consciousness in schizophrenic patients. Cognition, Elsevier, 1997, 65, pp.71-86. <ijn_00000257v2> Looking for the agent: an investigation into consciousness of action and self-consciousness in schizophrenic patients AbstractThe abilities to attribute an action to its proper agent and to understand its meaning when it is produced by someone else are basic aspects of human social communication. Several psychiatric syndromes, such as schizophrenia, seem to lead to a dysfunction of the awareness of one's own action as well as of recognition of actions performed by others. Such syndromes offer a framework for studying the determinants of agency, the ability to correctly attribute actions to their veridical source. Thirty normal subjects and 30 schizophrenic patients with and without hallucinations and/or delusional experiences were required to execute simple finger and wrist movements, without direct visual control of their hand. The image of either their own hand or an alien hand executing the same or a different movement was presented on a TV-screen in real time. The task for the subjects was to discriminate whether the hand presented on the screen was their own or not. Hallucinating and deluded schizophrenic patients were more impaired in discriminating their own hand from the alien one than the non-hallucinating ones, and tended to misattribute the alien hand to themselves. Results are discussed according to a model of action control. A tentative description of the mechanisms leading to action consciousness is proposed.

Agency, gait and self-consciousness

“…This simple concept closely resembles models of sensorimotor control, which states that in order to successfully control one's movements one has to be able to predict the immediate consequences of one's movements and confirm these predictions against the actual sensory feedback received from the environment. Importantly, these predictions not only allow humans to maintain and correct on-going movements but also to effectively separate their own actions from the environment (Jeannerod, 2003) and from actions of other agents (Daprati et al, 1997;Jeannerod, 2004). One approach to understanding the mechanisms underlying agency, the central monitoring framework (Frith et al, 2000b), is hence based on the internal model for sensorimotor control proposed by Wolpert et al (Miall and Wolpert, 1996;Wolpert et al, 1995).…”

“…Similarly, previous investigations of agency were important for the study of bodily selfconsciousness, but were focussed on agency for actions of fingers (Knoblich and Repp, 2009;Repp, 2005Repp, , 2006Repp and Knoblich, 2007), hands (Daprati et al, 1997;Daprati and Sirigu, 2002;Salomon et al, 2011;van den Bos and Jeannerod, 2002), or arms (Fourneret and Jeannerod, 1998;Franck et al, 2001;Nielsen, 1963;Synofzik et al, 2006). As the participants' body position was kept constant (except for actions of finger, hand, or arm, as indicated in Fig.…”

“…Most previous work on agency has focussed on the investigation of performance-related visual cues (Daprati et al, 1997;Farrer et al, 2003;Fourneret and Jeannerod, 1998;Franck et al, 2001;Salomon et al, 2011;Shimada et al, 2010;Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005;van den Bos and Jeannerod, 2002). Yet, the majority of our actions have consequences that are apparent across multiple sensory modalities including touch and audition.…”

Sense of agency and mentalizing: Dissociation of subdomains of social cognition in patients with schizophrenia

“…This is also reflected in the schizophrenia literature with respect to speech attribution (Johns et al, 2001, Johns et al, 2006, Stephane et al, 2009) and also with respect to incorrect agency attribution either to external sources or to the self (Daprati, et al, 1997, Fourneret, et al, 2001). In the majority of agency manipulation studies schizophrenia patients showed a tendency similar to that in our study, namely, atendency to attribute what they see to their own agency, despite visual discrepancies (Daprati, et al, 1997, Fourneret, et al, 2001, Haggard et al, 2003, Synofzik et al, 2008. In this regard, we could not detect any difference in attribution style between schizophrenia patients with-and without first-rank symptoms.…”

Visual enhancement of touch and the bodily self

“…In contrast, the visual experience of my own body can often be very similar to the Touch and the Body 4 experience of other bodies. Indeed, self-recognition experiments show that people may fail to recognise themselves when shown a screen that switches at random between a video image of their own hand moving, or the hand of an experimenter making a similar movement (Daprati et al, 1997;. In many cases, of course, geometrical perspective, body morphology, or even clothing detail identifies the individual, but the point remains that visual body images are in principle ambiguous between self and other.…”