Dataset Information

The sense of agency during continuous action: performance is more important than action-feedback association.

ABSTRACT: The sense of agency refers to the feeling that one is controlling events through one's own behavior. This study examined how task performance and the delay of events influence one's sense of agency during continuous action accompanied by a goal. The participants were instructed to direct a moving dot into a square as quickly as possible by pressing the left and right keys on a keyboard to control the direction in which the dot traveled. The interval between the key press and response of the dot (i.e., direction change) was manipulated to vary task difficulty. Moreover, in the assisted condition, the computer ignored participants' erroneous commands, resulting in improved task performance but a weaker association between the participants' commands and actual movements of the dot relative to the condition in which all of the participants' commands were executed (i.e., self-control condition). The results showed that participants' sense of agency increased with better performance in the assisted condition relative to the self-control condition, even though a large proportion of their commands were not executed. We concluded that, when the action-feedback association was uncertain, cognitive inference was more dominant relative to the process of comparing predicted and perceived information in the judgment of agency.

SUBMITTER: Wen W

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4404253 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The sense of agency during continuous action: performance is more important than action-feedback association.

Wen Wen W Yamashita Atsushi A Asama Hajime H

PloS one 20150420 4

The sense of agency refers to the feeling that one is controlling events through one's own behavior. This study examined how task performance and the delay of events influence one's sense of agency during continuous action accompanied by a goal. The participants were instructed to direct a moving dot into a square as quickly as possible by pressing the left and right keys on a keyboard to control the direction in which the dot traveled. The interval between the key press and response of the dot ...[more]

PMID: 25893992

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Project description:Voluntary actions can be fractionated in different phenomena: from the emergence of intentions and the ensuing motor plans and actions, to the anticipation and monitoring of their outcomes, to the appreciation of their congruency with intentions and to the eventual emergence of a sense of agency. It follows that motor intention and the sense of agency should occur at different stages in the normal generation of willed actions. Both these processes have been associated with a fronto-parietal motor network, but no study has investigated to what extent the two experiences can be dissociated for the brain regions involved. To this end, we assessed the PET/fMRI literature on agency and intentionality using a meta-analytic technique based on a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Beside a shared brain network involving the meso-frontal and prefrontal regions, the middle insula and subcortical structures, we found that motor intention and the sense of agency are functionally underpinned by separable sets of brain regions: an "intentionality network," involving the rostral area of the mesial frontal cortex (middle cingulum and pre-supplementary motor area), the anterior insula and the parietal lobules, and a "self-agency network," which involves the posterior areas of the mesial frontal cortex (the SMA proper), the posterior insula, the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. We were then able to confirm this functional organization by a subsequent seed-based fMRI resting-state functional connectivity analysis, with seeds derived from the intentionality/sense of agency specific clusters of the medial wall of the frontal lobe. Our results suggest the existence of a rostro-caudal gradient within the mesial frontal cortex, with the more anterior regions linked to the concept of motor intentionality and the brain areas located more posteriorly associated with the direct monitoring between the action and its outcome. This suggestion is reinforced by the association between the sense of agency and the activation of the occipital lobes, to suggest a direct comparison between the movement and its external (e.g., visual) consequences. The shared network may be important for the integration of intentionality and agency in a coherent appreciation of self-generated actions.

Dataset Information

The sense of agency during continuous action: performance is more important than action-feedback association.

Publications

The sense of agency during continuous action: performance is more important than action-feedback association.

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