The role of the temporoparietal junction in implicit and explicit sense of agency

Abstract

The experience of being in control of one's actions and thier outcomes is called the sense of agency. This is a fundamental feature of our human experience, and may underpin important social functions such as morality and responsibility. Sense of agency can be measured explicitly, by asking people to report their experience, or implicitly by recording the perceived time interval between actions and outcomes (intentional binding). The current studies used transcranial direct current stimulation to assess the role of left and right temporoparietal junction in both implicit and explicit sense of agency. Participants were informed that they could control the volume output of the computer with one of two buttons. Participants experienced reduced sense of agency when the outcome was inconsistent with their action. However, binding did not differ between congruent and incongruent action-outcomes. The modulation of explicit agency ratings by action-outcome congruency was significantly reduced by right TPJ stimulation (experiment 1) but not left TPJ stimulation (experiment 2). Implicit agency was not affected in either stimulation condition. These findings are discussed in terms of the possible neural mechanisms of implicit and explicit sense of agency.

Embodied Predictions, Agency, and Psychosis

“…Importantly, because of the assumed causal link between the two, we expect an anti-correlation within the same individuals (Corlett et al, 2019); e.g., participants with less sensory attenuation and stronger re-afferent signals should also report more conditioned hallucinations. Stronger evidence in favor of our theory could be obtained from causal, virtual lesion studies such as TMS studies: stimulation of regions critically involved in ego-centric inferences such as cerebellum (Blakemore et al, 1998;Synofzik et al, 2008c) or the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) (Hughes, 2018) should engender hallucinations in participants (Arzy et al, 2006).…”

Intentional binding coincides with explicit sense of agency

“…Intentional binding can be modulated by the frontal regions, especially the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) (Moore, Ruge, Wenke, Rothwell, & Haggard, 2010) and the left dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (Khalighinejad, Di Costa, & Haggard, 2016). In contrast, explicit sense of agency can be modulated by parietal regions, such as the right angular gyrus (Farrer, Frey, et al, 2008;Farrer & Frith, 2002) and the right temporoparietal junction (Hughes, 2018). However, meta-analytic study suggests that not only temporoparietal junction but also pre-SMA is associated with explicit sense of agency (Sperduti, Delaveau, Fossati, & Nadel, 2011).…”

“…Given this, it is plausible that degree of intentional binding is (in)directly associated with the degree of perceived sense of agency. Indeed, brain imaging and stimulation studies have suggested that, although frontal and parietal cortices are associated with agency judgment (Farrer, Frey, et al, 2008;Farrer & Frith, 2002;Hughes, 2018) and intentional binding (Khalighinejad et al, 2016;Moore et al, 2010), respectively, these two aspects of agency may recruit a shared neural mechanism. Explicit sense of agency can also relate to frontal region activities (Nachev et al, 2005;Nachev et al, 2007;Sperduti et al, 2011) and crucially, to front-parietal functional connectivity (Chambon et al, 2013).…”

“…In previous studies, intra-individual correlations between explicit sense of agency and intentional binding have not been examined and inter-individual correlations have not been found, perhaps because of methodological limitations (see 1.3) in that they employed different motor tasks and stimuli to measure agency judgment and intentional binding (Braun et al, 2014;Saito et al, 2015), or because of offline reports of these two measures (Dewey & Knoblich, 2014). Furthermore, other studies did not describe the intra-individual correlation analysis even though their experimental design may have been capable of making comparisons between agency judgment and intentional binding (Ebert & Wegner, 2010;Hughes, 2018;Pyasik et al, 2018;Wen et al, 2015). On the other hand, our two experiments employed measurement on a trial-by-trial basis both for agency rating and interval estimation between the action and its sensory outcome.…”

Seeing your own or someone else's hand moving in accordance with your action: The neural interaction of agency and hand identity

“…Furthermore, temporal mismatches between action and sensory outcome are associated to activation in posterior parietal regions, such as the superior parietal lobule (Leube, Knoblich, Erb, & Kircher, ), the precuneus (Farrer et al, ; Farrer & Frith, ), and the temporo‐parietal junction (Leube, Knoblich, Erb, Grodd, et al, ; Leube, Knoblich, Erb, Schlotterbeck, & Kircher, ; Limanowski, Kirilina, & Blankenburg, ; van Kemenade et al, ). Finally, activation in the temporo‐parietal junction, and especially in the angular gyrus, is associated with explicit awareness of non‐agency, that is, the subjective experience of not having caused a sensory event (Farrer et al, ; Hughes, ).…”