Tagini Sofia, Ghiggia Ada, Falco Sara, Castelli Lorys, Mauro Alessandro, Scarpina Federica
"Rita Levi Montalcini" Department of Neurosciences, University of Turin, Via Cherasco, 15, 10126 Turin, TO, Italy.
Laboratorio di Ricerca in Neurobiologia Clinica, Ospedale San Giuseppe, IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Via Cadorna, 90, 28824 Piancavallo, VCO, Italy.
Brain Sci. 2025 Jun 26;15(7):688. doi: 10.3390/brainsci15070688.
BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Sensory attenuation refers to the reduced perceptual intensity of self-generated stimuli and is considered a key marker of the sense of agency. While this phenomenon has been widely documented in individual contexts, less is known about how it operates during cooperative actions. In this study, we adopted a psychophysical approach to investigate sensory attenuation for auditory stimuli in both individual and interactive action contexts and examined the role of empathic traits in shaping the experience of agency.
A two-forced choices perceptual judgement task with auditory stimuli was adopted in healthy participants ( = 57), who judged the loudness of tones generated either by themselves or another person, across individual and cooperative conditions. To control for the factor of gender that might potentially influence prosocial attitudes, only cisgender women were included in this study. Our findings confirmed sensory attenuation for self-generated sounds in cooperative actions. However, contrary to previous reports, we did not observe enhanced attenuation in interactive contexts; instead, other-generated sounds were perceived as louder when embedded in cooperative actions. Notably, higher levels of empathic concern and perspective-taking were associated with reduced sensory attenuation in individual contexts, suggesting that empathy may modulate perceived self-other boundaries in agency experience.
These results challenge the view of sensory attenuation as a strict functional signature of self-agency and support a sensorimotor equivalence model, in which social and psychological variables shape the perception of action outcomes. This evidence is also supported by the convergence of neural networks involved in agency, perspective-taking, and empathy.
背景/目的：感觉衰减是指自我产生的刺激的感知强度降低，被认为是能动性的关键标志。虽然这一现象在个体情境中已被广泛记录，但关于它在合作行为中如何起作用的了解较少。在本研究中，我们采用了一种心理物理学方法来研究个体和互动行为情境中听觉刺激的感觉衰减，并考察共情特质在塑造能动性体验中的作用。
在健康参与者（n = 57）中采用了一项带有听觉刺激的二选一感知判断任务，参与者在个体和合作条件下判断由自己或他人产生的音调的响度。为了控制可能潜在影响亲社会态度的性别因素，本研究仅纳入了顺性别女性。我们的研究结果证实了合作行为中自我产生声音的感觉衰减。然而，与之前的报道相反，我们在互动情境中未观察到增强的衰减；相反，当嵌入合作行为时，他人产生的声音被感知为更响亮。值得注意的是，在个体情境中，较高水平的共情关注和换位思考与感觉衰减的降低相关，这表明共情可能会调节能动性体验中自我与他人边界的感知。
这些结果挑战了将感觉衰减视为自我能动性严格功能特征的观点，并支持了一种感觉运动等效模型，即社会和心理变量塑造了对行动结果的感知。参与能动性、换位思考和共情的神经网络的趋同也支持了这一证据。
