Metacognition bridges experiences and beliefs in Sense of Agency

Veillette, John P.; Ho, Letitia; Nusbaum, Howard C.

doi:10.31234/osf.io/4z2rj

Cited by 2 publications

References 32 publications

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Temporal Dynamics of Brain Activity Predicting Sense of Agency over Muscle Movements

Veillette

Lopes

Nusbaum

2023

Preprint

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Sense of agency (SoA), the conscious sensation that "I" am causing my own bodily movements, is a fundamental feature of human experience and a core facet of self-awareness. While prior work has measured participants' SoA over action consequences (e.g., a tone resulting from a button press), the neural mechanisms underlying SoA over action itself remains poorly understood since control of one's own muscles is normally unambiguous. In this work, we preempt subjects' own movements during a reaction time task using electrical muscle stimulation (EMS). On each trial, subjects report whether their movements were self-caused or caused by EMS. Then, by adaptively adjusting the timing of EMS delivery using Bayesian Optimization, we caused subjects to erroneously attribute roughly half of such involuntary (EMS-induced) movements to their own volition. Comparing trials with illusory agency to those without a sense of agency, we identify multivariate patterns of EEG activity that predict trial-by-trial SoA over EMS-caused movements across subjects. We show these EEG-derived predictors transition from transient to sustained dynamics as predicted by dual-process theories of action monitoring. In an exploratory analysis, we additionally decode SoA from nonlinear fractal measures of trial-by-trial brain activity. Results suggest that while the complexity (i.e., fractal dimension) of activity throughout the cortex is robustly higher when subjects experience agency over a behavior, but electrodes over motor regions appear to be selectively less sensitive to local perturbation (i.e., suppressed long-range correlations) when this sense of agency is absent. This finding is consistent with an account of SoA as a mechanism that gates the motor system from irrelevant sensation.

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Temporal Dynamics of Brain Activity Predicting Sense of Agency over Muscle Movements

Veillette

Lopes

Nusbaum

2023

Preprint

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Temporal Dynamics of Brain Activity Predicting Sense of Agency over Muscle Movements

Veillette,

Lopes,

Nusbaum

2023

J. Neurosci.

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Our muscles are the primary means through which we affect the external world, and the sense of agency (SoA) over the action through those muscles is fundamental to our self-awareness. However, SoA research to date has focused almost exclusively on agency over action outcomes rather than over the musculature itself, as it was believed that SoA over the musculature could not be manipulated directly. Drawing on methods from human-computer interaction and adaptive experimentation, we use human-in-the-loop Bayesian optimization to tune the timing of electrical muscle stimulation so as to robustly elicit a sense of agency over electrically-actuated muscle movements in male and female human subjects. We use time-resolved decoding of subjects’ EEG to estimate the time course of neural activity which predicts reported agency on a trial-by-trial basis. Like paradigms which assess SoA over action consequences, we found that the late (post-conscious) neural activity predicts SoA. Unlike typical paradigms, however, we also find patterns of early (sensorimotor) activity with distinct temporal dynamics predicts agency over muscle movements, suggesting that the “neural correlates of agency” may depend on the level of abstraction (i.e., direct sensorimotor feedback vs. downstream consequences) most relevant to a given agency judgment. Moreover, fractal analysis of the EEG suggests that SoA-contingent dynamics of neural activity may modulate the sensitivity of the motor system to external input.Significance StatementThe sense of agency – the feeling of “I did that” – when directing one’s own musculature is a core feature of human experience. We show that we can robustly manipulate the sense of agency over electrically actuated muscle movements, and we investigate the time course of neural activity that predicts the sense of agency over these actuated movements. We find evidence of two distinct neural processes – a transient sequence of patterns that begins in the early sensorineural response to muscle stimulation and a later, sustained signature of agency. These results shed light on the neural mechanisms by which we experience our movements as volitional.

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Metacognition bridges experiences and beliefs in Sense of Agency

Cited by 2 publications

References 32 publications

Temporal Dynamics of Brain Activity Predicting Sense of Agency over Muscle Movements

Temporal Dynamics of Brain Activity Predicting Sense of Agency over Muscle Movements

Temporal Dynamics of Brain Activity Predicting Sense of Agency over Muscle Movements

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