scholarly journals Implicit Agency in Observed Actions: Evidence for N1 Suppression of Tones Caused by Self-made and Observed Actions

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 752-764 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simandeep K. Poonian ◽  
Jessica McFadyen ◽  
Jessica Ogden ◽  
Ross Cunnington
Keyword(s):  
Interval Estimation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Intentional Binding ◽  
Visual Events ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
The World ◽  
Sensory Consequence

Every day we make attributions about how our actions and the actions of others cause consequences in the world around us. It is unknown whether we use the same implicit process in attributing causality when observing others' actions as we do when making our own. The aim of this research was to investigate the neural processes involved in the implicit sense of agency we form between actions and effects, for both our own actions and when watching others' actions. Using an interval estimation paradigm to elicit intentional binding in self-made and observed actions, we measured the EEG responses indicative of anticipatory processes before an action and the ERPs in response to the sensory consequence. We replicated our previous findings that we form a sense of implicit agency over our own and others' actions. Crucially, EEG results showed that tones caused by either self-made or observed actions both resulted in suppression of the N1 component of the sensory ERP, with no difference in suppression between consequences caused by observed actions compared with self-made actions. Furthermore, this N1 suppression was greatest for tones caused by observed goal-directed actions rather than non-action or non-goal-related visual events. This suggests that top–down processes act upon the neural responses to sensory events caused by goal-directed actions in the same way for events caused by the self or those made by other agents.

scholarly journals The evolving sense of agency: Context recency and quality modulate the interaction between prospective and retrospective processes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Di Plinio ◽  
Simone Arnò ◽  
Mauro Gianni Perrucci ◽  
Sjoerd Ebisch
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Sensorimotor Learning ◽  
Intentional Binding ◽  
Temporal Window ◽  
The World ◽  
Fundamental Process ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Dependent Processes

Humans acquire a sense of agency through their interactions with the world and their sensory consequences. Previous studies have highlighted stable agency-related phenomena like intentional binding, which depend on both prospective, context-dependent and retrospective, outcome-dependent processes. In the current study, we investigated the interaction between prospective and retrospective processes underlying the adaptation of an ongoing sense of agency. The results showed that prospective intentional binding developed during a temporal window of up to 20 prior events were independent of the nature of the ongoing event. By contrast, the characteristics of the ongoing event retrospectively influenced prospective intentional binding developed during a temporal window narrower than 6 prior events. These findings characterize the interaction between prospective and retrospective mechanisms as a fundamental process to continuously update the sense of agency through sensorimotor learning. High psychosis-like experience traits weakened this interaction, suggesting that reduced adaption to the context contribute to altered self-experience.

The sense of agency

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo ◽  
Thomas Buhrmann ◽  
Xabier E. Barandiaran
Keyword(s):  
Computational Models ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The World ◽  
Scheme Selection ◽  
Pragmatic Aspects ◽  
Representational World ◽  
Sensorimotor Approach

It has been recognized that the sensorimotor approach needs to be extended to account for not only the pragmatic aspects of perception but also the subjective phenomenology that characterizes experiences of the world and the self. In this chapter, the notion is proposed that sensorimotor agency can serve as the basis for a non-representational, world-involving theory of how agents perceive themselves as being the authors and in control of their actions. Both intentional and movement-related aspects in the phenomenology of agency experience are linked to processes of sensorimotor scheme selection and enactment in a self-sustaining network of interdependent sensorimotor schemes. The proposal is contrasted with traditional computational models in the context of various cases of pathological agency experience, and the ontological status of the sense of agency it implies is clarified in comparison with philosophical alternatives that deny its distinct experiential character.

Beeshu’s Laugh

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-195
Author(s):  
Stephennie Mulder
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
World War ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Popular Arts ◽  
Social Empowerment

Abstract Although the Syrian uprising initially seemed poised to proceed along a path similar to that of revolutions in other parts of the Arab world, the situation quickly devolved into one of the bloodiest and most destructive conflicts since World War II. Against the backdrop of nearly unprecedented devastation and harsh repression, a popular ‘arts of self-satire’ has flourished, creating a form of visual critique directed simultaneously at the regime and the self. On the surface, such works appear to be deeply cynical but in fact serve as a means of visual and social empowerment. In this article I argue that self-satire—and the ‘involvement’ it reveals, exposes and displays—creates a distinctly Syrian form of popular artistic production whose goal is to create a sense of agency and provoke intra-communal and public empathy with the suffering of the Syrian people. Thus, in Syria, the arts of the uprising are often darkly cynical and self-mocking, but that very self-satire becomes the means by which Syrians insist to themselves, and the world, that their circumstances must be revealed, witnessed and radically identified with.

Power of Darkness: Narrative and Biographical Reflexivity in A Series of Unfortunate Events

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-212
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH BULLEN
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Project Risk ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
High Earning ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
Children’S Exposure ◽  
Central Claim

This paper investigates the high-earning children's series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in relation to the skills young people require to survive and thrive in what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Children's textual culture has been traditionally informed by assumptions about childhood happiness and the need to reassure young readers that the world is safe. The genre is consequently vexed by adult anxiety about children's exposure to certain kinds of knowledge. This paper discusses the implications of the representation of adversity in the Lemony Snicket series via its subversions of the conventions of children's fiction and metafictional strategies. Its central claim is that the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of A Series of Unfortunate Events} models one of the forms of reflexivity children need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to empower them to undertake the biographical project risk society requires of them.

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Body Subject

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

Nihilistic Thinking as the Self-Will of the Mind and the Projects of Its Overcoming

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Irina N. Sidorenko
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spatial Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Radical Transformation

 The author analyzes the conceptions of ontological nihilism in the works of S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche, M. Heidegger, E. Jünger. On the basis of this analysis, violence is defined as a manifestation of nihilism, of the “will to nothingness” and hypertrophy of the self-will of man. The article demonstrates the importance of the problem of nihilism. The nihilistic thinking of modern man is expressed in the attitude toward a radical transformation of the world from the position of his “absolute” righteousness. The paradox of the current situation is that there is the reverse side of this transformative activity, when there is only the appearance of action and the dilution of responsibility. Confidence in the rightness of own views and beliefs increases the risk of the violent imposition of own vision of reality. Historical and philosophical reconstruction of the conceptions of nihilism allowed to reveal the following projects of its comprehension and resolution: (1) the project of “positing of values,” which consists in the transformation of the evaluation, which is understood as another perspective of positing values, leading to the affirmation of being; (2) the project of overcoming nihilism from the space of temporality, carried out through the resoluteness to accept the historicity of own existence; (3) the project of overcoming nihilism as the oblivion of being from the spatial perspective of the “line,” allowing to realize the “glimpse” of being. The author concludes that it is impossible to solve the problem of violence and its various forms of its manifestation without overcoming “ontological nihilism.” Significant role in solving the problem of ontological violence is assigned to philosophy as a critical and responsible form of thinking, which is capable to help a person to bear the burden of the world, to provide meanings and affirm being, as well as to unite people and resist the fundamentalist claims of exclusivity and rightness.

Discovering the Self and the World through the Eyes of God

1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (0) ◽  
pp. 173-199
Author(s):  
Hein BLOMMESTIJN
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The World

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

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