Naturalizing Sense of Agency with a Hierarchical Event-Control Approach

Kumar, Dhananjay; Srinivasan, Narayanan

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092431

Cited by 32 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…We have been investigating the relationship between people's sense of control over their environments and their subjective sense of agency. Experiments on event-control and agency have shown that the sense of agency is strongly sensitive to the time scale on which people can effectively exercise control (Kumar & Srinivasan 2014;. A natural corollary to this finding is that to maintain their sense of agency, agents may allocate mental resources preferentially to those time scales they find they can most effectively act upon.…”

Section: Notementioning

confidence: 99%

The behavioural constellation of deprivation: Causes and consequences

Pepper¹,

Nettle²

2017

Behav Brain Sci

282

279

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Socioeconomic differences in behaviour are pervasive and well documented, but their causes are not yet well understood. Here, we make the case that a cluster of behaviours is associated with lower socioeconomic status (SES), which we call "the behavioural constellation of deprivation." We propose that the relatively limited control associated with lower SES curtails the extent to which people can expect to realise deferred rewards, leading to more present-oriented behaviour in a range of domains. We illustrate this idea using the specific factor of extrinsic mortality risk, an important factor in evolutionary theoretical models. We emphasise the idea that the present-oriented behaviours of the constellation are a contextually appropriate response to structural and ecological factors rather than a pathology or a failure of willpower. We highlight some principles from evolutionary theoretical models that can deepen our understanding of how socioeconomic inequalities can become amplified and embedded. These principles are that (1) small initial disparities can lead to larger eventual inequalities, (2) feedback loops can embed early-life circumstances, (3) constraints can breed further constraints, and (4) feedback loops can operate over generations. We discuss some of the mechanisms by which SES may influence behaviour. We then review how the contextually appropriate response perspective that we have outlined fits with other findings about control and temporal discounting. Finally, we discuss the implications of this interpretation for research and policy.

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Section: Notementioning

confidence: 99%

The behavioural constellation of deprivation: Causes and consequences

Pepper¹,

Nettle²

2017

Behav Brain Sci

282

279

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“…Agency has been measured in the literature as the sense of control over an action (Synofzik et al, 2008), as the sense of having caused/produced an outcome (Bednark & Franz, 2014; Kumar & Srinivasan, 2014), and as the sense that an action is one's own and not another person's (Weiss, Tsakiris, Haggard, & Schütz-Bosbach, 2014 induce the movement of the virtual arm elicited a higher sense of agency over the action than activating visual areas, and merely observing the virtual arm move elicited the lowest sense of agency (see Fig. 2A).…”

Section: Agency Ratingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agency and responsibility over virtual movements controlled through different paradigms of brain–computer interface

Nierula

Spanlang

Martini

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Birgit Nierula is a neuroscientist and physiotherapist currently based in Leipzig, Germany.She received her M.Sc. degree in social cognitive and affective neuroscience from the Free University Berlin in 2012 and completed her PhD on agency and embodiment in virtual environments at the University of Barcelona in 2017. Key points summary We induced embodiment of a virtual body and its movements were controlled by two different BCI paradigmsone based on signals from sensorimotor versus one from visual cortical areas. BCI-control of movements engenders agency, but not equally for all paradigms. Cortical sensorimotor activation correlates with agency and responsibility. This has significant implications for neurological rehabilitation and neuroethics. AbstractAgency is the attribution of an action to the self and is a prerequisite for experiencing responsibility over its consequences. Here we investigated agency and responsibility by studying the control of movements of an embodied avatar, via brain computer interface (BCI) technology, in immersive virtual reality. After induction of virtual body ownership by visuomotor correlations, healthy participants performed a motor task with their virtual body. We compared the passive observation of the subject's 'own' virtual arm performing the task with (1) the control of the movement through activation of sensorimotor areas (motor imagery) and (2) the control of the movement through activation of visual areas (steady-state visually evoked potentials). The latter two conditions were carried out using a brain-computer interface (BCI) and both shared the intention and the resulting action. We found that BCI-control of movements engenders the sense of agency, which is strongest for sensorimotor areas activation. Furthermore, increased activity of sensorimotor areas, as measured using EEG, correlates with levels of agency and responsibility. We discuss the implications of these results for the neural bases of agency, but also in the context of novel therapies involving BCI and the ethics of neurotechnology. Berger, H. (1929). Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen. Archiv Für Psychiatrie Und Nervenkrankheiten, 87(1), 527-570. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01797193 Birbaumer, N. (2006). Breaking the silence: Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) for communication and motor control. Psychophysiology, 43(6), 517-532.

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“…The sense of control is closely associated with the sense of agency (i.e., the feeling of being the agent of control). Prior studies have suggested that the sense of agency exhibits a hierarchical relationship with goal-level control and perceptual-motor control (Kumar & Srinivasan, 2014, 2017. Specifically, to achieve a goal, people may take a series of actions, possibly extending over a long period or an entire lifespan.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Control Changes the Way We Look at the World

Wen

Haggard

2018

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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The feeling of control is a fundamental aspect of human experience and accompanies our voluntary actions all the time. However, how the sense of control interacts with wider perception, cognition, and behavior remains poorly understood. This study focused on how controlling an external object influences the allocation of attention. Experiment 1 examined attention to an object that is under a different level of control from the others. Participants searched for a target among multiple distractors on screen. All the distractors were partially under the participant's control (50% control level), and the search target was either under more or less control than the distractors. The results showed that, against this background of partial control, visual attention was attracted to an object only if it was more controlled than other available objects and not if it was less controlled. Experiment 2 examined attention allocation in contexts of either perfect control or no control over most of the objects. Specifically, the distractors were under either perfect (100%) control or no (0%) control, and the search target had one of six levels of control varying from 0% to 100%. When differences in control between the distractors and the target were small, visual attention was now more strongly drawn to search targets that were less controlled than distractors, rather than more controlled, suggesting attention to objects over which one might be losing control. Experiment 3 studied the events of losing or gaining control as opposed to the states of having or not having control. ERP measures showed that P300 amplitude proportionally encoded the magnitude of both increases and decreases in degree of control. However, losing control had more marked effects on P170 and P300 than gaining an equivalent degree of control, indicating high priority for efficiently detecting failures of control. Overall, our results suggest that controlled objects preferentially attract attention in uncontrolled environments. However, once control has been registered, the brain becomes highly sensitive to subsequent loss of control. Our findings point toward careful perceptual monitoring of degree of one's own agentic control over external objects. We suggest that control has intrinsic cognitive value because perceptual systems are organized to detect it and, once it has been acquired, to maintain it.

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Naturalizing Sense of Agency with a Hierarchical Event-Control Approach

Cited by 32 publications

References 32 publications

The behavioural constellation of deprivation: Causes and consequences

The behavioural constellation of deprivation: Causes and consequences

Agency and responsibility over virtual movements controlled through different paradigms of brain–computer interface

Control Changes the Way We Look at the World

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