The Senses of Agency and Ownership: A Review

Abstract

Usually, we do not question that we possess a body and act upon the world. This pre-reflective awareness of being a bodily and agentive self can, however, be disrupted by different clinical conditions. Whereas sense of ownership (SoO) describes the feeling of mineness toward one’s own body parts, feelings or thoughts, sense of agency (SoA) refers to the experience of initiating and controlling an action. Although SoA and SoO naturally coincide, both experiences can also be made in isolation. By using many different experimental paradigms, both experiences have been extensively studied over the last years. This review introduces both concepts, with a special focus also onto their interplay. First, current experimental paradigms, results and neurocognitive theories about both concepts will be presented and then their clinical and therapeutic relevance is discussed.

Influence of Personality Traits and Body Awareness on the Sense of Embodiment in Virtual Reality

“…Therefore, we are still far from uncovering all the mechanisms involved in eliciting high senses of embodiment in every user, which would also require further inter-disciplinary collaborations. For example, cognitive models trying to explain the sense of ownership is still an on-going topic of research evolving regularly [6] and involving different theories.…”

Sensorimotor conflicts induce somatic passivity and louden quiet voices in healthy listeners

“…Usually, motor and reafferent signals share similar features in the spatial and temporal domains and according to the comparator model 3,4 , movements are accompanied by prediction signals (of their sensory consequences), which are compared with the actual sensory feedback in a feed-forward manner. Under such conditions, spatiotemporal congruence between predicted and reafferent sensory signals is generally associated with self-attribution of the action 5,6 and the sense of agency: the feeling of being in control of one's movement 5,7 . A wealth of data has shown that incongruences or sensorimotor conflicts between predicted and reafferent sensory signals lead to the loss of agency and control [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] .…”

“…Participants applied sensorimotor stimulation either in a synchronous manner or with a delay while they also performed either the loudness or the self-other voice discrimination task. 6…”

Demand Characteristics Confound the Rubber Hand Illusion

“…In the rubber hand illusion (RHI; Botvinick & Cohen, 1998), synchronous brush strokes on a participant's concealed hand and a visible fake hand prompt reports of illusory sensations of touch and of ownership of the fake hand. The RHI is thought to reflect the role of multimodal integration in embodiment and to demonstrate that a fundamental aspect of conscious selfhood can be disrupted by a surprisingly simple intervention (for reviews see Braun et al, 2018;Riemer, Trojan, Beauchamp & Fuchs 2019). The validity of such claims ultimately rests upon the efficacy of methods to control for demand characteristics ("the totality of cues which convey an experimental hypothesis to the subject", Orne, 1962).…”