Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité University Medicine and St. Hedwig Hospital, Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany.
Institut Jean Nicod (ENS - EHESS - CNRS), Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure - PSL Research University, Paris, France.
Brain. 2017 Aug 1;140(8):2226-2239. doi: 10.1093/brain/awx136.
Sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over one's actions, and their consequences. It involves both predictive processes linked to action control, and retrospective 'sense-making' causal inferences. Schizophrenia has been associated with impaired predictive processing, but the underlying mechanisms that impair patients' sense of agency remain unclear. We introduce a new 'prospective' aspect of agency and show that subliminally priming an action not only influences response times, but also influences reported sense of agency over subsequent action outcomes. This effect of priming was associated with altered connectivity between frontal areas and the angular gyrus. The effects on response times and on frontal action selection mechanisms were similar in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy volunteers. However, patients showed no effects of priming on sense of agency, no priming-related activation of angular gyrus, and no priming-related changes in fronto-parietal connectivity. We suggest angular gyrus activation reflects the experiences of agency, or non-agency, in part by processing action selection signals generated in the frontal lobes. The altered action awareness that characterizes schizophrenia may be due to impaired communication between these areas.
能动性感知是指对自身行为及其后果的控制感。它既涉及与行为控制相关的预测过程，也涉及回溯性的“因果推断”。精神分裂症与预测加工受损有关，但导致患者能动性感知受损的潜在机制仍不清楚。我们引入了能动性的一个新的“前瞻性”方面，并表明潜意识启动一个动作不仅会影响反应时间，还会影响对后续动作结果的报告能动性感知。这种启动的影响与额区和角回之间的连通性改变有关。在精神分裂症患者和健康志愿者中，启动对反应时间和额部动作选择机制的影响是相似的。然而，患者在能动性感知方面没有受到启动的影响，角回没有与启动相关的激活，额顶叶连接也没有与启动相关的变化。我们认为角回的激活反映了部分agency 或 non-agency 的体验，这部分是通过处理在前额叶产生的动作选择信号来实现的。精神分裂症的特点是动作意识改变，这可能是由于这些区域之间的通讯中断所致。
