The feeling of agency hypothesis: a critique

Grünbaum, Thor

doi:10.1007/s11229-015-0704-6

Cited by 18 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Another example of the thetic approach is Grünbaum's (2015) argument that what subjects report (or experimenters interpret) as a feeling of agency, may ultimately be reducible to the awareness for one's conscious intentions (possibly based on premotor processes involving intentions, planning and action-selection), and therefore not a distinct kind of agency experience after all. In this respect we note that by considering only the case of an Bintention-free^feeling of agency (ibid., p. 21), the author implicitly rules out the possibility that the experience of agency may be distinct in virtue not of its irreducibility to conscious intentions, but of its being implicit in the first-personal givenness or egocentricity of (motor-)intentional actions; which we have here spelled out as the reaffirmation of a sensorimotor system's agency in intentional action.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sense of agency – a phenomenological consequence of enacting sensorimotor schemes

Bührmann

Paolo

2015

Phenom Cogn Sci

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The sensorimotor approach to perception addresses various aspects of perceptual experience, but not the subjectivity of intentional action. Conversely, the problem that current accounts of the sense of agency deal with is primarily one of subjectivity. But the proposed models, based on internal signal comparisons, arguably fail to make the transition from subpersonal computations to personal experience. In this paper we suggest an alternative direction towards explaining the sense of agency by braiding three theoretical strands: a world-involving, dynamical interpretation of the sensorimotor approach, an enactive description of sensorimotor agency as contrasted with organic agency in general, and a dynamical theory of equilibration within and between sensorimotor schemes. On this new account, the sense of oneself as the author of one's own actions corresponds to what we experience during the ongoing adventure of establishing, losing, and re-establishing meaningful interactions with the world. The meaningful relation between agent and world is given by the precarious constitution of sensorimotor agency as a self-asserting network of schemes and dispositions. Acts are owned as they adaptively assert the constitution of the agent. Thus, awareness for different aspects of agency experience, such as the initiation of action, the effort exerted in controlling it, or the achievement of the desired effect, can be accounted for by processes involved in maintaining the sensorimotor organization that enables these interactions with the world. We discuss these processes in detail from a non-representational, dynamical perspective and show how they cohere with the personal experience of agency.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sense of agency – a phenomenological consequence of enacting sensorimotor schemes

Bührmann

Paolo

2015

Phenom Cogn Sci

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“…First, nothing equivalent to the “pre‐reflective sense of agency” postulated in the previous model features in this alternative model. The new model is neutral as to whether or not such a thing exists (though see Grünbaum, 2015; Paglieri, 2013); it just implies that temporal binding can be explained without appealing to this notion. Secondly, the variable assumed to underlie binding in this new model is a belief in a causal relation between the two events that are bound together, rather than anything specifically to do with agency as such (though we will shortly return to ways in which agency might nevertheless be relevant to binding on this model, too).…”

Section: Toward An Alternative Conceptualization Of Temporal Bindingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal Binding, Causation, and Agency: Developing a New Theoretical Framework

et al. 2020

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In temporal binding, the temporal interval between one event and another, occurring some time later, is subjectively compressed. We discuss two ways in which temporal binding has been conceptualized. In studies showing temporal binding between a voluntary action and its causal consequences, such binding is typically interpreted as providing a measure of an implicit or prereflective "sense of agency." However, temporal binding has also been observed in contexts not involving voluntary action, but only the passive observation of a cause-effect sequence. In those contexts, it has been interpreted as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. These two views need not be in conflict with one another, if one thinks of them as concerning two separate mechanisms through which temporal binding can occur. In this paper, we explore an alternative possibility: that there is a unitary way of explaining temporal binding both within and outside the context of voluntary action as a top-down effect on perception reflecting a belief in causality. Any such explanation needs to account for ways in which agency, and factors connected with agency, has been shown to affect the strength of temporal binding. We show that principles of causal inference and causal selection already familiar from the literature on causal learning have the potential to explain why the strength of people's causal beliefs can be affected by the Correspondence should be sent to Christoph Hoerl, This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. extent to which they are themselves actively involved in bringing about events, thus in turn affecting binding.

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“…Without describing all of the arguments of these authors, it is clear that a single comparator mechanism cannot fully account for all aspect of SoA, in particular, a simple comparison between the predicted and actual sensory feedback is not a satisfactory model of broad SoA (see Grünbaum, 2015). More evidence is needed to decide whether a single comparison is a correct model of narrow SoA.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sense of agency for movements

Christensen

Grünbaum

2018

Consciousness and Cognition

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In this paper, we argue that the comparator model is not a satisfactory model of sense of agency (SoA). We present a theoretical argument and experimental studies. We show (1) most studies of SoA neglect a distinction between SoA associated with movements (narrow SoA) and SoA associated with environmental events (broad SoA); (2) the comparator model emerges from experimental studies of sensory consequences narrowly associated with movements; (3) narrow SoA can be explained by a comparator model, but a motor signal model is simpler and explain narrow SoA equally well; and (4) standard experimental paradigms study only broad SoA. Finally, we present results from two experiments, where we have failed to induce illusory narrow SoA in healthy participants. We believe our experimental approaches should have led to illusory SoA, if the comparator model of SoA was correct. The results challenge proponents of the comparator model of narrow SoA.

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The feeling of agency hypothesis: a critique

Cited by 18 publications

References 60 publications

The sense of agency – a phenomenological consequence of enacting sensorimotor schemes

The sense of agency – a phenomenological consequence of enacting sensorimotor schemes

Temporal Binding, Causation, and Agency: Developing a New Theoretical Framework

Sense of agency for movements

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