Research Focus
Agency in the face of error

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Experiencing oneself as the cause of an action is a fundamental building block for a sense of self. A recent study by Sato and Yasuda provides evidence that motor prediction contributes to the experience of agency. Their findings demonstrate that agency is experienced not only for intended, but also for erroneous, unintended actions. This extends our knowledge on the phenomenology of action, and raises questions about the relation between explicit reports and agency-related changes in sensation and perception.

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Action effects and experienced agency

At the beginning of each of Sato and Yasuda's experiments, the participants acquired an arbitrary mapping between two actions (left and right button press) and two auditory consequences (high or low tone). Thus, they learned that their action consistently produced a particular auditory effect at a particular time. In the second phase, two factors were varied: the congruency of the auditory effect in relation to the acquired action-effect mapping and the temporal delay between action and effect.

Intentions, errors, and experienced agency

Another important question Sato and Yasuda addressed is to which extent the experience of agency occurs for actions that are not intended such as when one commits an error. After learning the action-tone mapping, participants performed a letter version of the Eriksen flanker task, in which participants react to a target surrounded by flankers that are associated with the same or a different response as the target [18]. This task produces high error rates when responses are speeded.

Using this

Alternative explanations

Although there is converging evidence supporting the authors' interpretation that the experience of agency is linked to internal models predicting the consequences of actions 13, 14, 19, their results could also be interpreted within a different framework. Some researchers in the field of voluntary action postulate that the sense of agency does not rely on predictive mechanisms, but on a post-hoc evaluation of performed actions [20]. In particular, Wegner [21] has proposed that the

The next step towards understanding agency

In addition to studies using explicit judgments of agency at least two further lines of research have used implicit perceptual measures. Haggard and his colleagues have demonstrated that an action and its effect are perceived as being closer in time when the consequence is intended [24]. Blakemore and collaborators have shown that the same sensation is experienced as less intense when arising from a self-performed action than when arising from an other-performed action [25]. It is not yet clear

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