Sense of agency: Theory, methods, and application.

Abstract

Sense of agency is an area of growing research interest with important implications for our understanding of consciousness; motor control; psychiatric symptoms, such as passivity phenomena; hypnosis; and the neuropsychological basis of moral and legal responsibility. These seemingly disparate research topics all overlap in a push toward increasingly specific models of the subjective phenomenology of action. In December 2013, a group of cognitive scientists, philosophers, and clinicians working on sense of agency gathered for a workshop at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The collection of articles in this special issue presents a selection of ideas that have developed from that meeting and demonstrates some of the latest thinking on the theory, methods, and application of agency research. The issue begins with discussion and critiques of theoretical accounts of sense of agency, including a proposal for refinements of the comparator model (Carruthers, 2015, pp. 210-221) and a reevaluation of links between ownership and agency (Morgan, 2015, pp. 222-236). These contributions are followed by articles that examine methodological issues in empirical sense of agency research. The intentional binding technique is one of the main methods that contemporary researchers use to assess sense of agency, and a number of contributors focused on the mechanisms that underlie this methodology. A collection of experiments tested the importance of causality (Buehner, 2015, pp. 237-252), identityspecific sensory predictions (Bednark, Poonian, Palghat, McFadyen, & Cunnington, 2015, pp. 253-268), and individual differences in psychosis-like experiences and age (Graham, Martin-Iverson, & Waters, 2015, pp. 269-282) for understanding findings from the intentional binding task. This special issue also provides new empirical and theoretical findings relevant to clinical disorders of agency, including the finding of an association between the variability of intention judgments and schizotypy (Moore & Bravin, 2015, pp. 283-290), a conceptual account of how predictive coding may explain thought insertion (Ger

Non-hierarchical Influence of Visual Form, Touch, and Position Cues on Embodiment, Agency, and Presence in Virtual Reality

“…We used multiple measures including an embodiment scale commonly used in RHI studies (Longo et al, 2008b); the Sense of Agency Rating Scale (SOARS), which has previously been used to assess alterations to feelings of agency in studies of self-generated actions in hypnotic and clinical contexts (Polito et al, 2013, 2014, 2015); and rating scale items for presence typically used in studies of VR experiences (Sanchez-Vives and Slater, 2005). We found multivariate effects of FORM, TOUCH, and OFFSET across all measures, confirming that each of these cues has a broad influence on self-representation.…”

“…In another line of research, hypnotic suggestions have been shown to induce significant changes in the way that susceptible participants generate and monitor actions, leading to marked alterations to the sense of agency (Polito et al, 2014). Sense of agency has been measured in a variety of ways including explicit ratings of first-person experience (Bowers, 1981; Polito et al, 2014, 2015) and indirect, implicit measures such as intentional binding, which uses participants' time judgments regarding causal actions in a behavioral task as a proxy for agency (Haggard et al, 2002). …”