General and Experimental Psychology Unit, Department of Psychology, LMU, Munich 80802, Germany.
Cereb Cortex. 2023 Jun 20;33(13):8565-8580. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhad141.
Feeling in control of actions and events can enhance motivation for further actions. How this sense of agency (SoA) in fact influences flexible motor control remains poorly understood. Here, we investigated the effect of SoA on subsequent response inhibition in a modified go/no-go task with EEG recordings. We manipulated participants' SoA by varying the presence, predictability, and emotional valence of a visual outcome for a given motor action. When participants unexpectedly did not receive any visible outcome following their action on trial n - 1, they exhibited slower responses and lower hit rates to the go signal but higher rates of successful inhibition to the no-go signal on trial n, regardless of the emotional valence of the expected action outcome. Furthermore, enhanced inhibitory tendencies were accompanied by reduced N2 and P3 amplitudes, midfrontal theta power, and theta synchronization between midfrontal and medial to parietal areas, indicating that less top-down control is required for successful response inhibition on trial n after experiencing low SoA on trial n - 1. These findings suggest that feeling less in control in a preceding trial makes it easier to implement inhibitory control in the current trial, thereby providing new insights into the role of SoA in goal-directed behavior.
对行动和事件的掌控感可以增强进一步行动的动机。这种代理权感(SoA)实际上如何影响灵活的运动控制仍知之甚少。在这里,我们通过 EEG 记录在修改后的 Go/No-Go 任务中研究了 SoA 对随后反应抑制的影响。我们通过改变给定运动动作的视觉结果的存在、可预测性和情绪效价来操纵参与者的 SoA。当参与者在试验 n-1 后出乎意料地没有收到任何可见的结果时,他们对 Go 信号的反应速度较慢,命中率较低,但在试验 n 上对 No-Go 信号的成功抑制率较高,而不管预期动作结果的情绪效价如何。此外,增强的抑制倾向伴随着 N2 和 P3 振幅、前额叶θ功率以及前额叶和内侧至顶叶区域之间的θ同步性降低,这表明在经历了试验 n-1 上的低 SoA 后,在当前试验中实施抑制控制所需的自上而下的控制较少。这些发现表明,在前一个试验中感觉控制较少会使当前试验中的抑制控制更容易实施,从而为 SoA 在目标导向行为中的作用提供了新的见解。