Tanaka Takumi, Imamizu Hiroshi
Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology and Faculty of Letters, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
Cognitive Mechanisms Laboratories, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Sorakugun, Kyoto, Japan.
Commun Psychol. 2025 Apr 29;3(1):70. doi: 10.1038/s44271-025-00240-7.
Sense of agency (SoA) refers to the feeling of controlling one's body and the external environment. The traditional comparator model posits that SoA arises from a match between predicted and actual action outcomes. However, when learning new motor skills, individuals initially lack outcome predictions and gradually develop an internal model of action-outcome mapping through trial-and-error, a process known as motor exploration. To investigate the development of SoA in such scenarios, we employed a de novo motor learning task that participants had never experienced before. Using a data glove, participants controlled a cursor on a screen through finger movements. In Experiment 1, participants learned a spatial hand-to-screen mapping from scratch via motor exploration. At different learning phases, we measured and compared participants' SoA for cursor movements that either conformed to the learned mapping or incorporated spatial or temporal biases. Initially, SoA was driven solely by temporal contiguity between finger and cursor movements. As learning progressed, SoA increased for cursor movements following the learned mapping compared to those following the spatially biased, unlearned mapping. In contrast, such changes did not occur in Experiment 2, where participants only imitated gesture images and memorized corresponding screen positions. The findings enhance existing SoA theories by elucidating the origins of the comparator process and highlighting the critical role of motor exploration.
能动感（SoA）是指控制自身身体和外部环境的感觉。传统的比较器模型认为，能动感源于预测的和实际的动作结果之间的匹配。然而，在学习新的运动技能时，个体最初缺乏结果预测能力，而是通过试错逐渐建立起动作-结果映射的内部模型，这一过程称为运动探索。为了研究在这种情况下能动感的发展，我们采用了一项参与者从未经历过的全新运动学习任务。参与者使用数据手套通过手指运动控制屏幕上的光标。在实验1中，参与者通过运动探索从零开始学习空间手部到屏幕的映射。在不同的学习阶段，我们测量并比较了参与者对符合所学映射或包含空间或时间偏差的光标运动的能动感。最初，能动感仅由手指和光标运动之间的时间连续性驱动。随着学习的推进，与遵循空间偏差的未学习映射的光标运动相比，遵循所学映射的光标运动的能动感有所增加。相比之下，在实验2中没有发生这种变化，在实验2中参与者只是模仿手势图像并记住相应的屏幕位置。这些发现通过阐明比较器过程的起源并突出运动探索的关键作用，增强了现有的能动感理论。
