Abstract
The sense of agency is the attribution of oneself as the cause of one’s own actions and their effects. Accurate agency judgments are essential for adaptive behaviors in dynamic environments, especially in conditions of uncertainty. However, it is unclear how agency judgments are made in ambiguous situations where self-agency and non-self-agency are both possible. Agency attribution is thus thought to require higher-order neurocognitive processes that integrate several possibilities. Furthermore, neural activity specific to self-attribution, as compared with non-self-attribution, may reflect higher-order critical operations that contribute to constructions of self-consciousness. Based on these assumptions, the present study focused on agency judgments under ambiguous conditions and examined the neural correlates of this operation with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants performed a simple but demanding agency-judgment task, which required them to report on whether they attributed their own action as the cause of a visual stimulus change. The temporal discrepancy between the participant’s action and the visual events was adaptively set to be maximally ambiguous for each individual on a trial-by-trial basis. Comparison with results for a control condition revealed that the judgment of agency was associated with activity in lateral temporo-parietal areas, medial frontal areas, the dorsolateral prefrontal area, and frontal operculum/insula regions. However, most of these areas did not differentiate between self- and non-self-attribution. Instead, self-attribution was associated with activity in posterior midline areas, including the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex. These results suggest that deliberate self-attribution of an external event is principally associated with activity in posterior midline structures, which is imperative for self-consciousness.
Highlights
The ‘‘sense of agency’’, an essential aspect of self-recognition, refers to the self-attribution of the cause of one’s own action, and its effects on the outside world [1,2,3,4]
We found that attributing self-agency to an external event in our task was associated with activity in posterior midline areas
Results of Basic Contrasts Contrasts between the agency-judgment condition and colorjudgment condition revealed significant neural activation in many of the cortical areas previously implicated in agency judgment
Summary
The ‘‘sense of agency’’, an essential aspect of self-recognition, refers to the self-attribution of the cause of one’s own action, and its effects on the outside world [1,2,3,4]. The mechanisms underlying the sense of agency have primarily been proposed to involve an internal feed-forward model and a comparator mechanism, where the consequences of intentional actions are predicted by the internal feed-forward model, and compared with the actual sensory feedback by the comparator mechanism [5,6,7]. The attribution of the event as self-generated is based on whether actual sensory input matches the prediction. The sense of agency can be ambiguous and uncertain in a dynamic environment. When the discrepancy between action and feedback is small, causation of an event can be attributed to the self, and when this discrepancy is large, causation can be attributed to external sources. As the environment can change dynamically, judgments about agency under uncertain conditions are important to guarantee adaptive and precise behaviors. The present study focused on the judgment of agency in such ambiguous situations
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