Extending experiences of voluntary action by association

Abstract

"Sense of agency" refers to the experience that links one's voluntary actions to their external outcomes. It remains unclear whether this ubiquitous experience is hardwired, arising from specific signals within the brain's motor systems, or rather depends on associative learning, through repeated cooccurrence of voluntary movements and their outcomes. To distinguish these two models, we asked participants to trigger a tone by a voluntary keypress action. The voluntary action was always associated with an involuntary movement of the other hand. We then tested whether the combination of the involuntary movement and tone alone might now suffice to produce a sense of agency, even when the voluntary action was omitted. Sense of agency was measured using an implicit marker based on time perception, namely a shift in the perceived time of the outcome toward the action that caused it. Across two experiments, repeatedly pairing an involuntary movement with a voluntary action induced key temporal features of agency, with the outcome now perceived as shifted toward the involuntary movement. This shift required involuntary movements to have been previously associated with voluntary actions. We show that some key aspects of agency may be transferred from voluntary actions to involuntary movements. An internal volitional signal is required for the primary acquisition of agency but, with repeated association, the involuntary movement in itself comes to produce some key temporal features of agency over the subsequent outcome. This finding may explain how humans can develop an enduring sense of agency in nonnatural cases, like brainmachine interfaces. I n a series of brilliant experiments, Roger Sperry switched the nerves for flexion of the rat hind leg with the nerves for extension. After that, whenever the bottom of the foot was injured, the rat extended the foot instead of flexing it. Rats never learned to lift up the paw, and "no adaptive functioning of the nervous system took place" (1). When the optic nerves of salamanders were cut, and the eyeball rotated 180°, salamanders saw upside down for the rest of their lives (2). These experiments suggested that key sensorimotor brain circuits are largely hardwired, and impervious to modification by experience."Sense of agency" refers to the capacity to control one's actions and, through them, the external world. Sense of agency is fundamental to instrumental and goal-directed actions, and forms the cornerstone of humans' astonishing capacity to change their physical and social environment (3). However, it remains unclear how the brain produces this distinctive and important subjective experience. Some recent results have linked the sense of agency to specific preparatory volitional signals in frontal (4) and parietal (5) areas, which then trigger voluntary motor commands passing through the "final common path" (6) of the primary motor cortex. Importantly, these "volitional signals" were generated well before the occurrence of both action and outcome, and were strongly correlated ...

Assessing Self-Awareness through Gaze Agency

“…In the past, the sense of agency has been measured using essentially three different approaches. One method is based on temporal-binding, and exploits the capability of perceiving the temporal unity between an action and a causally linked event [9,10]. Another method is based on sensory attenuation, and exploits the reduction of the sensory intensity of the consequences of an action [11,12,13].…”

The self as a generative, teleological, and subjective prior: Mutually-modulated temporal agency

“…As a result, under the interacted condition (active and generative condition), the two probability distributions were mutually-tugged (bottom right) in comparison to the baseline condition (top right). Christensen, Cleeremans, & Haggard, 2016;Caspar, Desantis, et al, 2016;Cavazzana, Begliomini, & Bisiacchi, 2017;Khalighinejad & Haggard, 2016;Ritterband-Rosenbaum, Nielsen, & Christensen, 2014) c.f. (Dewey & Knoblich, 2014).…”

“…(Dewey & Knoblich, 2014). As a result, we can discuss agency in terms of prediction error (in perception, (Ruess, Thomaschke, & Kiesel, 2017)), contingency (in cognition, (Khalighinejad & Haggard, 2016)), and even responsibility (in social contexts, (Caspar, Christensen, et al, 2016)) within the same temporal domain.…”

“…Though previous studies have suggested that unnatural (Caspar, Cleeremans, & Haggard, 2015;Ebert & Wegner, 2010) c.f. (Khalighinejad & Haggard, 2016), unreasonable (Takahata et al, 2012), or improbable outcomes (Haggard et al, 2002;Moore & Haggard, 2008) c.f. (Ruess et al, 2017) are less temporally associated (i.e., indicating other-agency), it is necessary to compare between the same sensory stimuli (e.g., tone) and same action (e.g., key-press), but with different meanings or "priors" (Farrer, Valentin, & Hupe, 2013) in terms of self-agency (Moutoussis et al, 2014).…”

“…The onsetspecific modulation of outcome timing is not depending on whether the motor action is active or passive. As long as the motor action, and its outcome (onset tone), is coupled (Engbert, Wohlschlager, & Haggard, 2008;Khalighinejad & Haggard, 2016), or in other words, as long as the tone is generated by the motor action, the perceived onset timing would shift back. We can also see the result of so-called intentional binding as follows.…”