Positive Technology Journal

The Limits of Agency in Walking Humans.

Neuropsychologia. 2010 Feb 6;

Authors: Kannape OA, Schwabe L, Tadi T, Blanke O

An important principle of human ethics is that individuals are not responsible for actions performed when unconscious. Recent research found that the generation of an action and the building of a conscious experience of that action (agency) are distinct processes and crucial mechanisms for self-consciousness. Yet, previous agency studies have focussed on actions of a finger or hand. Here, we investigate how agents consciously monitor actions of the entire body in space during locomotion. This was motivated by previous work revealing that (1) a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness concerns a single and coherent representation of the entire spatially situated body and (2) clinical instances of human behaviour without consciousness occur in rare neurological conditions such as sleepwalking or epileptic nocturnal wandering. Merging techniques from virtual reality, full-body tracking, and cognitive science of conscious action monitoring, we report experimental data about consciousness during locomotion in healthy participants. We find that agents consciously monitor the location of their entire body and its locomotion only with low precision and report that while precision remains low it can be systematically modulated in several experimental conditions. This shows that conscious action monitoring in locomoting agents can be studied in a fine-grained manner. We argue that the study of the mechanisms of agency for a person's full body may help to refine our scientific criteria of selfhood and discuss sleepwalking and related conditions as alterations in neural systems encoding motor awareness in walking humans.

Sense of agency primes manual motor responses.

Perception. 2009;38(1):69-78

Authors: Longo MR, Haggard P

Perceiving the body influences how we perceive and respond to stimuli in the world. We investigated the respective effects of different components of bodily representation--the senses of ownership and agency--on responses to simple visual stimuli. Participants viewed a video image of their hand on a computer monitor presented either in real time, or with a systematic delay. Blocks began with an induction period in which the index finger was (i) brushed, (ii) passively moved, or (iii) actively moved by the participant. Subjective reports showed that the sense of ownership over the seen hand emerged with synchronous video, regardless of the type of induction, whereas the sense of agency over the hand emerged only following synchronous video with active movement. Following induction, participants responded as quickly as possible to the onset of visual stimuli near the hand by pressing a button with their other hand. Reaction time was significantly speeded when participants had a sense of agency over their seen hand. This effect was eliminated when participants responded vocally, suggesting that it reflects priming of manual responses, rather than enhanced stimulus detection. These results suggest that vision of one's own hand-and, specifically, the sense of agency over that hand-primes manual motor responses.