Abstract
The contingency of sensory feedback to one’s actions is essential for the sense of agency, and experimental violation of this contingency is a standard paradigm in the neuroscience of self-awareness and schizophrenia. However, neural responses to this violation have arbitrarily been interpreted either as activation of the system generating forward prediction (agency-error account) or decreased suppression of processing of predictable input (prediction-error account). In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, the regions responsive to auditory contingency errors were examined if they exhibited responses to an isolated auditory stimulus and to passive-contingency delay, which the prediction-error account expects. These responses were observed only in the auditory association cortex in the right superior temporal gyrus. Several multimodal and motor-association cortices did not exhibit these responses, suggesting their relevance to the agency-error account. Thus, we formulated the coexistence and dissociation of two accounts in neural contingency-error responses.
Highlights
The sense of agency refers to the feeling of one’s own movement being caused or controlled by oneself, and it forms the essential basis of self-consciousness[1,2]
In neuroimaging studies, the neural response to contingency error is recognized as the index of neural correlates of the sense of agency
While perceiving the tactile feedback of one’s own action, it was occasionally delivered by external agents or with some temporal delay[12]. These manipulations typically resulted in activation of relevant sensory areas[20], such as the bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) for auditory feedback[18], and multimodal or motor-association areas, such as the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), supplementary motor area (SMA), and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)[18,19,20,21,24,25,26,27,28]
Summary
The sense of agency refers to the feeling of one’s own movement being caused or controlled by oneself, and it forms the essential basis of self-consciousness[1,2]. When there is some mismatch between the predicted and actual inputs due to improper functioning of motor control system or external forces, the differential component in sensory processing triggers the compensation for action deviation, recalibration of the internal model, or the violated sense of agency and increased self-monitoring[8,9,13,14,15,16]. The predictable inputs are meaningless, and their suppression allows the agents to focus their cognitive resources on meaningful inputs[2,20,22,31] This account considers contingency error a class of prediction error, and it is primarily interested in the response of unimodal sensory areas
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