3 research outputs found
New frontiers in the neuroscience of the sense of agency
No full textThe sense that I am the author of my own actions, including the ability to distinguish my own from other people’s actions, is a fundamental building block of our sense of self, on the one hand, and successful social interactions, on the other. Using cognitive neuroscience techniques, researchers have attempted to elucidate the functional basis of this intriguing phenomenon, also trying to explain pathological abnormalities of action awareness in certain psychiatric and neurological disturbances. Recent conceptual, technological and methodological advances suggest several interesting and necessary new leads for future research on the neuroscience of agency. Here I will describe new frontiers for the field such as the need for novel and multifactorial paradigms, anatomically plausible network models for the sense of agency, investigations of the temporal dynamics during agentic processing and ecologically valid virtual reality applications
The feeling of agency: Empirical indicators for a pre-reflective level of action awareness
No full textThe sense of agency has been defined as the sense that I am the author of my own actions. This sense, however, is usually not reflected upon but instead pre-reflectively experienced. Experimental approaches usually measure the sense of agency by judgments or verbal reports, despite evidence that the sense of agency is not sufficiently assessed on such a reflective level. Here we sought to identify non-verbal measures of the sense of agency, particularly testing the relevance of physiological activity such as skin conductance and heart rate. Manipulating the visual feedback to an executed movement, we investigated how well physiological activity and other movement parameters differed between real and false feedback (i.e., between actual agency and non-agency), and how they related to accuracy of agency judgments. Skin conductance and heart rate did not differ between agency and non-agency situations; neither did they inform agency judgments. In contrast, movement onsets—particularly, discrepancies between feedback and movement onsets—were related to agency judgments. Overall, our results indicate weak visceral-somatic associations with the sense of agency. Thus, physiological activity did not prove to be an empirical indicator for the feeling of agency
Heads for learning, tails for memory: Reward, reinforcement and a role of dopamine in determining behavioural relevance across multiple timescales
No full textDopamine has long been tightly associated with aspects of reinforcement learning and motivation in simple situations where there are a limited number of stimuli to guide behaviour and constrained range of outcomes. In naturalistic situations, however, there are many potential cues and foraging strategies that could be adopted, and it is critical that animals determine what might be behaviourally relevant in such complex environments. This requires not only detecting discrepancies with what they have recently experienced, but also identifying similarities with past experiences stored in memory. Here, we review what role dopamine might play in determining how and when to learn about the world, and how to develop choice policies appropriate to the situation faced. We discuss evidence that dopamine is shaped by motivation and memory and in turn shapes reward-based memory formation. In particular, we suggest that hippocampal-striatal-dopamine networks may interact to determine how surprising the world is and to either inhibit or promote actions at time of behavioural uncertainty
