Abstract
The sense of agency (SoA) refers to the perception that an action is the consequence of one’s own intention. Studies exploring the SoA with neuroimaging techniques summarized the available data and confirmed a role of fronto-parietal areas and subcortical structures. However, these studies focused on specific regions of interest. We thus conducted a whole-brain meta-analysis to verify which regions emerge as significant for the SoA, specifically during motor execution. We performed a systematic search on PubMed, PsycINFO and Cochrane databases with the following inclusion criteria: studies investigating SoA with a visuo-motor task by means of neuroimaging in healthy subjects. We performed a quantitative, whole-brain, meta-analysis of neural correlates of the SoA based on the activation likelihood estimation. Of the 785 articles identified by our search, 22 studies met our inclusion criteria (169 foci, 295 subjects for decreased agency, and 58 foci, 165 subjects for normal agency). Neural correlates of decreased agency were the bilateral temporo-parietal junction (MNI: 50,-54,14; -44,-52,42; -48,-56,8). Normal agency showed no significant clusters of activation. This meta-analysis confirmed the key role of areas responsible for decreased SoA during motor control, whereas normal agency did not show a specific neural signature. This study sets the ground for future regions-of-interest analyses of neural correlates of SoA, as well as potential neuromodulation studies, which might be relevant in medical conditions presenting with abnormal SoA.
Highlights
The sense of agency (SoA) is an important aspect of human self-consciousness, that allows us to distinguish between self-generated actions or thoughts and external ones [1, 2]
Out of the 59 remaining studies, we further excluded 22 studies with patients, and 15 studies where the sense of agency was not tested with a motor paradigm and an artificial manipulation of the visual feedback
According to the comparator model of agency [9, 10], the brain area responsible for the comparison between the expected and actual motor outcome lays in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), at the junction with the temporal lobe, a region often identified as temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) [1]
Summary
The sense of agency (SoA) is an important aspect of human self-consciousness, that allows us to distinguish between self-generated actions or thoughts and external ones [1, 2]. The SoA can be explained by the “comparator” model, a theory initially developed to account for motor learning and control [9], and later expanded to agency processing [10, 11]. In case of mismatch, a certain degree of incongruency is perceived, and we feel that we are not the agent of the action [14] This is typically the case for externally generated or passive movements, which are not associated with any motor intention and cannot be predicted by the forward process [12, 15]. The comparator model fits well with a non-conceptual feeling of agency, where discrepancies between actual and intended movements are unconsciously detected It does not account for a higher order, conceptual judgement of agency, where agency assignments to the self or the other are made [16]. If the feeling of agency has been defined as an unconscious ongoing flow of action processing, where actions are tagged as self-caused or not [17], the judgement of agency is its conscious counterpart, where several multidimensional factors, including expectations of action and beliefs of being the agent of the movement, are processed [16, 18]
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