Beck Brianna, Di Costa Steven, Haggard Patrick
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, WC1N 3AZ London, United Kingdom.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, WC1N 3AZ London, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2017 May;162:54-60. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.02.002. Epub 2017 Feb 14.
The sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over one's actions, and, through them, over external events. One proposed marker of implicit sense of agency is 'intentional binding'-the tendency to perceive voluntary actions and their outcomes as close in time. Another is attenuation of the sensory consequences of a voluntary action. Here we show that the ability to choose an outcome through action selection contributes to implicit sense of agency. We measured intentional binding and stimulus intensity ratings using painful and non-painful somatosensory outcomes. In one condition, participants chose between two actions with different probabilities of producing high or low intensity outcomes, so action choices were meaningful. In another condition, action selection was meaningless with respect to the outcome. Having control over the outcome increased binding, especially when outcomes were painful. Greater sensory attenuation also tended to be associated with stronger binding of the outcome towards the action that produced it. Previous studies have emphasised the link between sense of agency and initiation of voluntary motor actions. Our study shows that the ability to control outcomes by discriminative action selection is another key element of implicit sense of agency. It also investigates, for the first time, the relation between binding and sensory attenuation for the same events.
行动感指的是对自身行动以及通过这些行动对外部事件的控制感。一种被提出的内隐行动感标志是“意图绑定”——即倾向于将自愿行动及其结果在时间上视为接近。另一个标志是自愿行动的感觉后果的减弱。在此我们表明，通过行动选择来选择结果的能力有助于内隐行动感。我们使用疼痛和非疼痛的躯体感觉结果来测量意图绑定和刺激强度评级。在一种条件下，参与者在两种产生高强度或低强度结果概率不同的行动之间进行选择，所以行动选择是有意义的。在另一种条件下，行动选择对于结果而言是无意义的。对结果的控制增加了绑定，尤其是当结果是疼痛的时候。更大程度的感觉减弱也往往与结果对产生它的行动的更强绑定相关。先前的研究强调了行动感与自愿运动行动发起之间的联系。我们的研究表明，通过有区别的行动选择来控制结果的能力是内隐行动感的另一个关键要素。它还首次研究了同一事件的绑定与感觉减弱之间的关系。
