Abstract
Self-agency is the experience of being the agent of one’s own thoughts and motor actions. The intact experience of self-agency is necessary for successful interactions with the outside world (i.e., reality monitoring) and for responding to sensory feedback of our motor actions (e.g., speech feedback control). Reality monitoring is the ability to distinguish internally self-generated information from outside reality (externally-derived information). In the present study, we examined the relationship of self-agency between lower-level speech feedback monitoring (i.e., monitoring what we hear ourselves say) and a higher-level cognitive reality monitoring task. In particular, we examined whether speech feedback monitoring and reality monitoring were driven by the capacity to experience self-agency—the ability to make reliable predictions about the outcomes of self-generated actions. During the reality monitoring task, subjects made judgments as to whether information was previously self-generated (self-agency judgments) or externally derived (external-agency judgments). During speech feedback monitoring, we assessed self-agency by altering environmental auditory feedback so that subjects listened to a perturbed version of their own speech. When subjects heard minimal perturbations in their auditory feedback while speaking, they made corrective responses, indicating that they judged the perturbations as errors in their speech output. We found that self-agency judgments in the reality-monitoring task were higher in people who had smaller corrective responses (p = 0.05) and smaller inter-trial variability (p = 0.03) during minimal pitch perturbations of their auditory feedback. These results provide support for a unitary process for the experience of self-agency governing low-level speech control and higher level reality monitoring.
Highlights
Self-agency is the experience of being the agent of one’s own thoughts and motor actions (Haggard, 2017; Korzyukov et al, 2017)
We found no association in inter-trial variability in peak response during 100 cents with accurate identification of externally-derived information on the reality monitoring task
We found that when participants’ pitch was perturbed by 100 cents: (1) their peak perturbation responses were larger compared to when their pitch was perturbed by 400 cents; (2) their peak perturbation responses negatively correlated with accurate self-agency judgments on the realitymonitoring task; and (3) the inter trial variability in their peak perturbation responses negatively correlated with their self-agency judgments on the reality-monitoring task
Summary
Self-agency is the experience of being the agent of one’s own thoughts and motor actions (Haggard, 2017; Korzyukov et al, 2017). Reality monitoring is defined as the ability to distinguish the source of internally self-generated information from outside reality (externally-derived information; Johnson et al, 1993; Keefe et al, 1999; Vinogradov et al, 2008; Subramaniam et al, 2012). Self-Agency Mediates Speech Feedback Monitoring own self-generated actions (self-agency; Bentall et al, 1991; Johnson et al, 1993; Morrison and Haddock, 1997; Keefe et al, 1999; Vinogradov et al, 2008; Subramaniam et al, 2012). We examined whether speech feedback monitoring and reality monitoring were driven by the capacity to experience self-agency—the ability to make reliable predictions about the outcomes of self-generated actions
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