This work was supported by a European Commission Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (011457) and a Brunel Research Initiative (BRIEF) Award to CR and a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship to MH. We are indebted to all our participants. “
“Goal-directed action requires the ability to identify the consequences learn more of our behaviour in the external world. We use the term ‘agency’ to refer to
this fundamental aspect of human self-consciousness (Pacherie, 2008). Recent theoretical work distinguishes between two important aspects of agency (Synofzik et al., 2008a, 2008b). First, people can make explicit judgements about their agency (“I did that”). Second, there is a subjective feeling of control that accompanies one’s own actions, even in the absence
of any conscious awareness or reflective thought, known as sense of agency. The dominant experimental model for studying agency involves explicit judgements of whether a sensory event is caused by one’s action, or by that of another agent. Several studies have used self-recognition paradigms to investigate this explicit sense selleck chemicals llc of agency ( Daprati et al., 2007; Tsakiris et al., 2005). In the typical design, the participant makes a manual action, and sees video feedback which may either show their own action or the action of another person. Participants judge whether they are viewing their own hand action or not. Other studies have extended this paradigm from recognition of one’s own hand action to judging whether arbitrary effects, such as appearance of a symbol on a computer screen, are caused by one’s own key press actions or another person’s ( Sato and Yasuda, 2005; Wegner and Wheatley, 1999). Spatial ( Daprati et al., 2007) and temporal ( Farrer et al., 2008; Wegner and Wheatley, 1999) congruence of one’s own action and sensory feedback are key cues for self-attributing agency. Another prominent approach to investigate agency has been to manipulate agency as an independent variable by either giving participants control or not giving them
control over some external event, and contrasting different levels of control ( Metcalfe and Greene, 2007). Level of control is often manipulated by introducing a feedback delay. Interestingly, click here recent neuroimaging studies failed to find any clear neural correlates for positive judgements of agency, but showed that the right angular gyrus plays a key role in rejecting agency based on lack of temporal congruence ( Farrer et al., 2003, 2008). The importance of the parietal areas in general, and the angular gyrus in particular, in processing of agency was confirmed by patient studies. Lesions including this area were reported to produce a deficit in recognising visual feedback of one’s own action ( Sirigu et al., 1999). It remains unclear whether angular gyrus activation is linked to explicit judgement of agency, or whether automatic monitoring of action outcomes is sufficient. For example, Miele et al.