Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Mind Institute, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Station 19, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 May;48(6):1628-36. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.02.005. Epub 2010 Feb 8.
An important principle of human ethics is that individuals are not responsible for actions performed when unconscious. Recent research found that the generation of an action and the building of a conscious experience of that action (agency) are distinct processes and crucial mechanisms for self-consciousness. Yet, previous agency studies have focussed on actions of a finger or hand. Here, we investigate how agents consciously monitor actions of the entire body in space during locomotion. This was motivated by previous work revealing that (1) a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness concerns a single and coherent representation of the entire spatially situated body and (2) clinical instances of human behaviour without consciousness occur in rare neurological conditions such as sleepwalking or epileptic nocturnal wandering. Merging techniques from virtual reality, full-body tracking, and cognitive science of conscious action monitoring, we report experimental data about consciousness during locomotion in healthy participants. We find that agents consciously monitor the location of their entire body and its locomotion only with low precision and report that while precision remains low it can be systematically modulated in several experimental conditions. This shows that conscious action monitoring in locomoting agents can be studied in a fine-grained manner. We argue that the study of the mechanisms of agency for a person's full body may help to refine our scientific criteria of self-hood and discuss sleepwalking and related conditions as alterations in neural systems encoding motor awareness in walking humans.
人类伦理学的一个重要原则是,当个体失去意识时,不应对其行为负责。最近的研究发现,行动的产生和对该行动的有意识体验(能动性)是不同的过程,也是自我意识的关键机制。然而,以前的能动性研究主要集中在手指或手的动作上。在这里,我们研究了在运动过程中,主体如何有意识地监控整个身体在空间中的动作。这是受到之前的工作启发,该工作揭示了(1)自我意识的一个基本方面涉及到对整个空间定位身体的单一而连贯的表示,以及(2)在罕见的神经条件下,如梦游或癫痫性夜间漫游,会出现没有意识的人类行为。我们融合了虚拟现实、全身跟踪和意识行动监测认知科学的技术,报告了健康参与者在运动过程中意识的实验数据。我们发现,主体只能以低精度有意识地监控他们整个身体的位置及其运动,并报告说,虽然精度仍然很低,但它可以在几种实验条件下系统地调节。这表明,在运动中的主体中可以以精细的方式研究能动性的意识监测。我们认为,对一个人整个身体的能动性机制的研究可能有助于完善我们的自我认同科学标准,并讨论梦游和相关情况,因为它们是编码行走人类运动意识的神经系统的改变。
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