The experience of agency: an interplay between prediction and postdiction.

Matthis Synofzik,Martin Voss,Gottfried Vosgerau

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00127

Abstract

The experience of agency, i.e., the registration that I am the initiator of my actions, is a basic and constant underpinning of our interaction with the world. Whereas several accounts have underlined predictive processes as the central mechanism (e.g., the comparator model by C. Frith), others emphasized postdictive inferences (e.g., post-hoc inference account by D. Wegner). Based on increasing evidence that both predictive and postdictive processes contribute to the experience of agency, we here present a unifying but at the same time parsimonious approach that reconciles these accounts: predictive and postdictive processes are both integrated by the brain according to the principles of optimal cue integration. According to this framework, predictive and postdictive processes each serve as authorship cues that are continuously integrated and weighted depending on their availability and reliability in a given situation. Both sensorimotor and cognitive signals can serve as predictive cues (e.g., internal predictions based on an efferency copy of the motor command or cognitive anticipations based on priming). Similarly, other sensorimotor and cognitive cues can each serve as post-hoc cues (e.g., visual feedback of the action or the affective valence of the action outcome). Integration and weighting of these cues might not only differ between contexts and individuals, but also between different subject and disease groups. For example, schizophrenia patients with delusions of influence seem to rely less on (probably imprecise) predictive motor signals of the action and more on post-hoc action cues like e.g., visual feedback and, possibly, the affective valence of the action outcome. Thus, the framework of optimal cue integration offers a promising approach that directly stimulates a wide range of experimentally testable hypotheses on agency processing in different subject groups.

Highlights

The experience of agency, i.e., the registration that I am the initiator of my actions, is a basic and constant underpinning of our interaction with the world: whenever we grasp, type, or walk, we register the resulting sensory consequences as caused by ourselves
This will be illustrated by the example of impaired agency processing in schizophrenia patients suffering from delusions of control
We describe the affective valence of an action outcome as a relatively novel self-agency cue, which has not been considered in the original predictive and postdictive accounts and which might explain why delusions of control in schizophrenia www.frontiersin.org

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The experience of agency, i.e., the registration that I am the initiator of my actions, is a basic and constant underpinning of our interaction with the world: whenever we grasp, type, or walk, we register the resulting sensory consequences as caused by ourselves. In contrast to these earlier studies, this framework brings in a new perspective by starting off from an analysis of predictive vs postdictive accounts, by focussing on delusions of control but rather the experience of agency in general [in contrast to e.g., Fletcher and Frith (2009)] and by integrating very recent results on both predictive processes (e.g., Desantis et al, 2012; Hughes et al, 2013) and post-hoc processes It proposes a novel scheme how and on which level different agency cues might be integrated (Figure 1). We describe the affective valence of an action outcome as a relatively novel self-agency cue, which has not been considered in the original predictive and postdictive accounts and which might explain why delusions of control in schizophrenia www.frontiersin.org

Prediction and postdiction in agency awareness

Findings

CONCLUSIONS