High schizotypy conditionally have a weaker sense of agency

Abstract

Sense of agency (SOA) is the experience that a person causes and controls one’s own actions and effects on the outside world. Intentional binding, the subjective compression of temporal interval between voluntary action and its outcome, is an implicit indicator of SOA. The altered SOA have been consistently reported in schizophrenia patients, however, whether psychologically healthy individuals who scored highly on the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) would also show abnormalities of self-agency. To clarify the relationship between SOA and schizophrenia from the continuum perspective, this study employed interval estimation paradigm to investigate the sense of self-agency in individuals with highly schizotypal. Thirty-five individuals scoring above 36 (High Schizotypy) and thirty-seven individuals scoring below 10 (Low Schizotypy) on SPQ participated in this study. The results showed that the High Schizotypy have a weaker sense of self-agency in 100 ms delay condition. Additionally, SOA and psychotic symptoms were negatively correlated, however, this relationship was confined to 100 ms condition. These suggested that the abnormally weakened SOA was closely associated with High Schizotypy, furthermore, there is a time window for the abnormal weakening of the SOA caused by the voluntarily action.