Electrophysiological Markers of the Sense of Agency: Contributions of Temporal Proximity, Temporal Order and Action-Effect Congruency

The sense of agency is a feeling that one’s actions affect the outer world, which can be implicitly measured by the intentional binding paradigm. Intentional binding is a temporal illusion in which the time interval of one’s voluntary action and the following effect is perceived as contracted. Although the abnormality of the sense of agency is related to various mental states, it is unclear how depression affects the sense of agency at the sensorimotor level in general. Twenty-four nonclinical participants judged the timing of a keypress and a tone, with or without action-effect association, and reported their depressive symptoms. Replicating the previous studies, in this study, the time prediction of the keypress shifted toward the tone and that of the tone shifted toward the keypress when a tone followed a voluntary keypress. It was found that individuals with more severe depressive symptoms had smaller intentional binding, indicating a decreased sense of agency at the sensorimotor level in subclinical depression. This finding could aid in further understanding the experience of depression at a fundamental level and treating such patients.

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Absence of electroencephalographic evidence of implicit action-effect intentional binding with varying effect probability

10.1101/2020.12.17.423230 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Max Seignette ◽

Mark Schram Christensen

Keyword(s):

Subjective Experience ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Sense Of Agency ◽

Peak Latency ◽

Intentional Binding ◽

Auditory Event ◽

Action Effect ◽

Simple Action ◽

Cortical Potentials

AbstractThe subjective experience of an attraction in time of an action and the event caused by the action is known as the intentional binding phenomenon. Intentional binding is a robust phenomenon and has been associated with subjective sense of agency. In this study we tested possible electrophysiological equivalents to the intentional binding phenomenon under a simple action-effect task, where pressing of a button caused tones to occur at different pitches or delays with different probabilities. Changing the probabilities of the effect of an action has previously shown to influence the intentional binding phenomenon. We tested whether changes in action-effect probability gave rise to differences in movement related cortical potentials (MRCP) slopes, peak latency and auditory event related potential (aERP) changes of amplitude or latency of the N1 and P2 components of the central aERP. We also tested differences in MRCP across the whole scalp prior to movements, and to differences in aERP across the whole scalp after the tone is played. Contrary to our expectations, we found no electrophysiological indications of intentional binding when action-effect contingencies were changed according to conditions that give rise to subjective experience of binding in time.

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Sense of agency for mental actions: Insights from a belief-based action-effect paradigm

Consciousness and Cognition ◽

10.1016/j.concog.2021.103225 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 96 ◽

pp. 103225

Author(s):

Edmundo Lopez-Sola ◽

Rubén Moreno-Bote ◽

Xerxes D. Arsiwalla

Keyword(s):

Sense Of Agency ◽

Action Effect ◽

Mental Actions

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Temporal context affects the perceived time of visual events

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review ◽

10.3758/s13423-019-01682-x ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 56-61

Author(s):

Ljubica Jovanovic ◽

Pascal Mamassian

Keyword(s):

Temporal Order ◽

Fixed Interval ◽

Temporal Context ◽

Fixed Duration ◽

Interval Duration ◽

Variable Time ◽

Temporal Proximity ◽

Visual Events ◽

Presentation Time ◽

The Moment

AbstractWe investigated whether the moment at which an event is perceived depends on its temporal context. Participants learned a mapping between time and space by watching the hand of a clock rotating a full revolution in a fixed duration. Then the hand was removed, and a target disc was flashed within a fixed-interval duration. Participants were to indicate where the hand would have been at the time of the target. In three separate experiments, we estimated the disruption from a distractor disc that was presented before or after the target disc, with a variable time between them. The target was either revealed at the end of the trial or cued beforehand, and in the latter case, was cued by either color or temporal order. We found an attraction to the presentation time of the distractor when both events were attended equally (target revealed at the end). When the target was cued beforehand, the reported time was under- or overestimated, depending on whether the nature of distractor had to be decoded (precued by color) or not (precued by order). In summary, the perceived time of an event is always affected by other events in temporal proximity, but the nature of this effect depends on how each event is attended.

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The sense of agency is action–effect causality perception based on cross-modal grouping

Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rspb.2013.0991 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 280 (1763) ◽

pp. 20130991 ◽

Cited By ~ 37

Author(s):

Takahiro Kawabe ◽

Warrick Roseboom ◽

Shin'ya Nishida

Keyword(s):

Visual Stimuli ◽

Sense Of Agency ◽

Auditory Stimuli ◽

Action Effect ◽

Additional Signal ◽

Causal Perception ◽

Sensory Event ◽

Key Press ◽

Analogous Effect

Sense of agency, the experience of controlling external events through one's actions, stems from contiguity between action- and effect-related signals. Here we show that human observers link their action- and effect-related signals using a computational principle common to cross-modal sensory grouping. We first report that the detection of a delay between tactile and visual stimuli is enhanced when both stimuli are synchronized with separate auditory stimuli (experiment 1). This occurs because the synchronized auditory stimuli hinder the potential grouping between tactile and visual stimuli. We subsequently demonstrate an analogous effect on observers' key press as an action and a sensory event. This change is associated with a modulation in sense of agency; namely, sense of agency, as evaluated by apparent compressions of action–effect intervals (intentional binding) or subjective causality ratings, is impaired when both participant's action and its putative visual effect events are synchronized with auditory tones (experiments 2 and 3). Moreover, a similar role of action–effect grouping in determining sense of agency is demonstrated when the additional signal is presented in the modality identical to an effect event (experiment 4). These results are consistent with the view that sense of agency is the result of general processes of causal perception and that cross-modal grouping plays a central role in these processes.

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Sense of Agency for Mental Actions: Insights from a Belief-Based Action-Effect Paradigm

10.1101/2021.01.30.428924 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Edmundo Lopez-Sola ◽

Rubén Moreno-Bote ◽

Xerxes D. Arsiwalla

Keyword(s):

Sense Of Agency ◽

Sources Of Information ◽

Multiple Sources ◽

Intentional Binding ◽

Action Effect ◽

Binding Effect ◽

Computer Interfaces ◽

High Level ◽

Mental Actions

AbstractA substantial body of research in the past few decades has converged on the idea that the so-called “sense of agency”, the feeling of being in control of our own actions, arises from the integration of multiple sources of information at different levels. In this study, we investigated whether a measurable sense of agency can be detected for mental actions, without the contribution of motor components. We used a fake action-effect paradigm, where participants were led to think that a motor action or a particular thought could trigger a sound. Results showed that the high-level sense of agency, measured through explicit reports, was of comparable strength for motor and mental actions. The ‘intentional binding’ effect, a phenomenon typically associated with the experience of agency, was also observed for both motor and mental actions, with the only exception of short action-effect delays. Furthermore, a consistent relationship between explicit reports of agency and intentional binding was found. Taken together, our results provide novel insights into the specific role of intentional cues in instantiating a sense of agency, even in the absence of motor signals. These results may have important implications for future brain-computer interfaces as well as for the study of pathological disruptions of agency.

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Action-effect binding is decreased in motor conversion disorder: Implications for sense of agency

Movement Disorders ◽

10.1002/mds.25408 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 28 (8) ◽

pp. 1110-1116 ◽

Cited By ~ 35

Author(s):

Sarah M. Kranick ◽

James W. Moore ◽

Nadia Yusuf ◽

Valeria T. Martinez ◽

Kathrin LaFaver ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Conversion Disorder ◽

Sense Of Agency ◽

Action Effect ◽

Effect Binding

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Set-relevance Determines the Impact of Distractors on Episodic Memory Retrieval

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_00601 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 26 (9) ◽

pp. 2070-2086 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Sze Chai Kwok ◽

Tim Shallice ◽

Emiliano Macaluso

Keyword(s):

Episodic Memory ◽

Memory Retrieval ◽

Temporal Order ◽

Memory Search ◽

Attention And Memory ◽

Attention Network ◽

Temporal Proximity ◽

Imaging Results ◽

The Right ◽

The Impact

We investigated the interplay between stimulus-driven attention and memory retrieval with a novel interference paradigm that engaged both systems concurrently on each trial. Participants encoded a 45-min movie on Day 1 and, on Day 2, performed a temporal order judgment task during fMRI. Each retrieval trial comprised three images presented sequentially, and the task required participants to judge the temporal order of the first and the last images (“memory probes”) while ignoring the second image, which was task irrelevant (“attention distractor”). We manipulated the content relatedness and the temporal proximity between the distractor and the memory probes, as well as the temporal distance between two probes. Behaviorally, short temporal distances between the probes led to reduced retrieval performance. Distractors that at encoding were temporally close to the first probe image reduced these costs, specifically when the distractor was content unrelated to the memory probes. The imaging results associated the distractor probe temporal proximity with activation of the right ventral attention network. By contrast, the precuneus was activated for high-content relatedness between distractors and probes and in trials including a short distance between the two memory probes. The engagement of the right ventral attention network by specific types of distractors suggests a link between stimulus-driven attention control and episodic memory retrieval, whereas the activation pattern of the precuneus implicates this region in memory search within knowledge/content-based hierarchies.

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Exploring the Boundaries of the Number–Temporal Order Association

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169/a000285 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 62 (3) ◽

pp. 198-205 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Dana Ganor-Stern

Keyword(s):

Embodied Cognition ◽

Mental Representation ◽

Temporal Order ◽

Past Research ◽

Numerical Comparison ◽

Negative Number ◽

Comparison Task ◽

Negative Numbers ◽

The Past

Past research has shown that numbers are associated with order in time such that performance in a numerical comparison task is enhanced when number pairs appear in ascending order, when the larger number follows the smaller one. This was found in the past for the integers 1–9 ( Ben-Meir, Ganor-Stern, & Tzelgov, 2013 ; Müller & Schwarz, 2008 ). In the present study we explored whether the advantage for processing numbers in ascending order exists also for fractions and negative numbers. The results demonstrate this advantage for fraction pairs and for integer-fraction pairs. However, the opposite advantage for descending order was found for negative numbers and for positive-negative number pairs. These findings are interpreted in the context of embodied cognition approaches and current theories on the mental representation of fractions and negative numbers.

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