Sense of agency in the human brain

Abstract

In adult life, people normally know what they are doing. This experience of controlling one's own actions and, through them, the course of events in the outside world is called 'sense of agency'. It forms a central feature of human experience; however, the brain mechanisms that produce the sense of agency have only recently begun to be investigated systematically. This recent progress has been driven by the development of better measures of the experience of agency, improved design of cognitive and behavioural experiments, and a growing understanding of the brain circuits that generate this distinctive but elusive experience. The sense of agency is a mental and neural state of cardinal importance in human civilization, because it is frequently altered in psychopathology and because it underpins the concept of responsibility in human societies.

Virtual Reality for Non-Ordinary Consciousness

“…The result is a subjective (and objectively measurable) sense of ownership over the virtual/prosthetic body part, e.g., the rubber hand (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998;Apps and Tsakiris, 2014), self-identification with the full body, and self-location (Blanke and Metzinger, 2009;Blanke, 2012). The integration of bodily ownership with motor signals yields the sense of agency, or volition over one's actions (Tsakiris et al, 2007;Ma and Hommel, 2015;Trzepacz et al, 2015;Haggard, 2017). The BSC constraints are modulated by the confluence of hierarchical bottom-up and top-down streams of information in the nervous system, which have been formalized in Bayesian models of predictive coding (Clark, 2013;Samad et al, 2015) and the free-energy principle (Friston, 2010;Apps and Tsakiris, 2014;Pezzulo et al, 2015;Donnarumma et al, 2017).…”

Hypo- and Hyperagentic Psychiatric States, Next-Generation Closed-Loop DBS, and the Question of Agency

“…Should CLDs be used for direct modulation of agency, this again exacerbates the signal detection problem. Finally, because the concrete experience of initiating a voluntary action is not sufficient for sense of agency (Haggard 2017) and the controversy of whether patients have a realistic assessment of their (limited) agentic capacity corroborates the need not to focus on patients' self-reports entirely.…”

“…Naturally, factors other than a brain-internal device influence the feeling of agency: priming individuals can increase sense of agency while coercion reduces it (Haggard 2017). Studies have additionally shown that both, retrospective inference and the prediction of outcomes are linked to the brains' generation of the experience of agency (Haggard 2017). Future studies should therefore distinguish between prospective and retrospective agency, integrate implicit and explicit tests whilst controlling for confounding factors.…”

“…excessive experience of one's own causation and control over events), others are hypoagentic (i.e. reduced experience of causation and control) (Haggard 2017). As illustrated by the (hypoagentic) depression dimension of loss of control (Disner et al 2011), a pathological process that negatively influences the sense of agency is intrinsic to the condition being treated.…”

“…Future studies should therefore distinguish between prospective and retrospective agency, integrate implicit and explicit tests whilst controlling for confounding factors. That the brain regularly produces a sense of agency through retrospective inferences that lacks or doesn't use a direct signal about the true origins of actions (Haggard 2017), must also be considered. Should CLDs be used for direct modulation of agency, this again exacerbates the signal detection problem.…”