Neuropsychology of the Sense of Agency : From Consciousness to Action

Not nothing without you but not the same Erich Fried (1979) How do I know that I am the person who is moving? The neuroscience of action has identified specific cognitive processes that allow the organism to refer the cause or origin of an action to its agent. This sense of agency has been defined as the sense that I am the one who is causing or generating an action or a certain thought in my stream of consciousness. As such, one can distinguish actions that are self-generated from those generated by others, giving rise to the experience of a self-other disti- tion in the domain of action. A tentative list of the features distinguishing the concept of agency includes awareness of a goal, of an intention to act, and of initiation of action; awareness of movements; a sense of activity, of mental effort, and of control; and the concept of authorship. However, it remains unclear how these various aspects of action and agency are related, to what extent they are dissociable, and whether some are more basic than others. Their sources remain to be specified and their relationship to action specification and action control mechanism is as yet unknown. Title Page 3 Copyright Page 4 Preface 5 Table of Contents 8 List of Contributors 13 Section I Cognition, Consciousness and Agency 15 1 The Sense of Agency in Psychology and Neuropsychology 16 1.1 To Be an Agent: What Is the Sense of Agency? 16 1.2 Action and Awareness of Action 17 1.2.1 Does Awareness of Action Differ from the Sense of Agency? 18 1.3 The Key Determinant Mechanisms for the Sense of Agency 19 1.4 A Critical Approach to Intentions and Intentional Binding Phenomenon 22 1.4.2 Self-consciousness and the Illusion of Agency 25 1.4.1 Awareness, Consciousness, and Agency: Unconscious Perception and Unconscious Intentions 24 1.4.3 Consciousness of Self and Consciousness of the Goal 27 1.5 The Sense of Initiation 28 1.5.1 The Limited Sense of Initiation: Libet’s Contribution 28 1.6 The Sense of Control 30 References 33 2 Affordances and the Senseof Joint Agency 36 2.1 Introduction 36 2.2 Social Perception and Mind-reading 37 2.3 The Concept of Affordances 41 2.4 Instrumental vs Deontic Affordances 43 2.5 Canonical Neurons as Reflecting Instrumental Affordances 44 2.6 Egocentric vs Allocentric Perception of Affordances 45 2.7 Mirror Neurons and Action-dependent Affordances 47 2.8 Interpersonal Affordances 49 2.9 Two Models of Joint Action 51 2.10 Conclusions 53 References 54 Section II Brain, Agency and Self-agency: Neuropsychological Contributions to the Development of the Sense of Agency 57 3 The Neuropsychology of Senses of Agency: Theoretical and Empirical Contributions 58 3.1 Different Types of the Sense of Agency 58 3.2 Feeling and Judgment in the Sense of Agency 60 3.3 Empirical Paradigms of the Judgment of Agency 62 3.3.1 The Awareness of Action: The Contribution of Event-related Potentials 62 3.3.2 Time Perception and the Sense of Agency 63 3.3.3 Visual Feedback and Awareness of Action 64 3.3.4 Somatosensory Information for Agency 66 3.3.5 Sense Integration 68 3.3.6 Experimental Paradigms for the Feeling of Agency 68 3.3.6.1 Illusion of Intention 69 3.3.6.2 Experiencing the Disruption of Agency: Neuropsychological Evidence 70 3.3.6.3 Embodiment or How to Represent the Self by Body Perception 71 3.4 Minimal Self and Narrative Self 72 3.4.1 Minimal Self: Self-agency as “I” 72 3.4.2 Self Ascription 74 3.4.3 Narrative Self: The Sense of Continuity 74 References 77 4 Functional Anatomy of the Senseof Agency: Past Evidence and Future Directions 79 4.1 Introduction 79 4.2 A Functional Anatomy of the Sense of Agency: Past Evidence 80 4.2.1 The Posterior Parietal Cortex and Inferior Parietal Lobule 82 4.2.2 The Cerebellum 83 4.2.3 The Posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus 84 4.2.4 The Insula 84 4.2.5 The Supplementary Motor Area 85 4.2.6 The Prefrontal Cortex 85 4.3 Future Directions 86 4.4 Conclusions 87 References 87 5 The Monitoring of Experience and Agency in Daily Life: A Study with Italian Adolescents 91 5.1 Agency and Its Role in Human Behavior and Experience 91 5.2 Agency and Experience 94 5.2.1 Defining and Measuring Experience 95 5.2.2 Agency in Daily Life: A Crucial Component of Optimal Experience 97 5.3 Empirical Evidence: A Study with Italian Adolescents 99 5.3.1 Aims and Methods 101 5.3.2 Results 101 5.4 Agency and Daily Experience: A Promising Research Domain 106 References 110 6 Agency and Inter-agency, Actionand Joint Action: Theoretical and Neuropsychological Evidence 116 6.1 Introduction 116 6.2 An Introduction to Agency 117 6.3 The Beginning: Intentions and Collective Intentions 118 6.3.1 From I to We 118 6.3.2 We in Action 119 6.4 Doing Things Together: Joint Action and the Sense of Agency 120 6.5 Over the Self-other Differentiation: Circular Interactions and Joint Agency 122 6.5.1 The Intersubjective Origins of Joint Agency: A Developmental Perspective 124 6.6 Inter-acting Selves, Social Agency, and Neural Correlates 125 6.6.1 The Original Distinction of Our-selves and Other-selves 126 6.6.2 Self-other Differentiation, Agency and Sociality: Hypotheses and Neuropsychological Evidence 127 6.7 Conclusions 128 References 129 Section III Clinical Aspects Associated with Disruption of the Sense of Agency 132 7 Disruption of the Sense of Agency: From Perception to Self-knowledge 133 7.1 Introduction 133 7.2 Disruption of Agency in the Perceptual Field and in Proprioception 133 7.2.1 Agency and Body: Predictivity Function of the Body for Self-representation 134 7.2.2 Perceptual Illusions of Body 135 7.2.3 Blindsight and Numbsense 136 7.2.4 A Tentative Conclusion Regarding Perceptual Level Impairment 137 7.3 Attentive Deficits and the Sense of Agency 137 7.3.1 Visual Neglect Syndrome 137 7.3.2 Somatosensory Neglect 138 7.4 The Fallibility of Self-attribution of Agency in Neuropsychiatry 139 7.4.1 Frontotemporal Dementia and the Delusion of Control in Frontal Deficits 140 7.4.2 Agency and Schizophrenia 140 7.4.3 Concluding Remarks on Schizophrenia 142 7.4.4 Autism: Mentalizing vs Agency Disruption 143 7.4.5 Dissociated States: Obsessive-compulsive Disorder 144 7.4.6 Lines of Research on the Disruption of Agency: ERPs and Personality 145 References 148 8 Disturbances of the Sense of Agency in Schizophrenia 152 8.1 Introduction 152 8.2 The Comparator Model and Its Explanatory Limitations 153 8.3 Feeling of Agency vs Judgement of Agency 155 8.4 Optimal Cue Integration as the Basis of the Sense of Agency 157 8.5 Altered Cue Integration as the Basis of Delusions of Influence 158 8.5.1 Intentional Binding: Impaired Predictions and Excessive Linkage of External Sensory Events 158 8.5.2 Perception of Hand Movements: Imprecise Predictions Prompting an Over-reliance on External Action Cues 159 8.6 Conclusions 160 References 161 9 Looking for Outcomes: The Experience of Control and Sense of Agency in Obsessive-compulsive Behaviors 163 9.1 Introduction 163 9.2 The Clinical Features and Phenomenology of OCD 164 9.3 Sense of Agency in OCD: Empirical Data 166 9.4 Summary and Discussion 170 9.5 Conclusions 173 References 174 10 Body and Self-awareness: Functional and Dysfunctional Mechanisms 178 10.1 The Sense of Agency and the Sense of Ownership as Components of Self-consciousness 178 10.2 The Sense of Body Ownership vs the Sense of Agency 179 10.3 The Sense of My Body as Mine: A Threefold Perspective 180 10.4 A Spatial Hypothesis of Body Representation 183 10.5 Neural Substrates of the Sense of Ownership 185 10.6 Disruption of the Sense of Ownership: Conscious and Non-conscious Body Perception 187 10.6.1 The Rubber Hand Illusion: Evidence of Disownership Phenomena 189 10.6.2 Other Body Impairments: Neuropsychological Disorders 190 References 192 Subject Index 195 Two related fields, the psychological and neuropsychological ones, provide an exhaustive overview of the complex issue of agency and self-agency. The cognitive and neuropsychological correlates are here considered as two sides of the same coin, since we have the main scope to find a correspondence between the hardware (cerebral processes) and the software (cognitive processes) of the representation of agency. All living system self-regulates, or, within any living system, there is a need of communication among the different parts of that system. This can include a unit as small as a cell, a pl