Ricerc@Sapienza

The control of one’s own movements and of their impact on the external world generates a feeling of control referred to as Sense of Agency (SoA). SoA is experienced when actions match predictions and is reduced by unpredicted events. The present study investigated the contribution of monitoring two fundamental components of action—movement execution and goal achievement—that have been most often explored separately in previous research. We have devised a new paradigm in which participants performed goal-directed actions while viewing an avatar’s hand in a mixed-reality scenario.

The Sense of Agency (SoA) is the experience of controlling one’s movements and their external consequences. Accumulating evidence suggests that freedom to act enhances SoA, while prediction errors are known to reduce it. Here, we investigated if prediction errors related to movement or to the achievement of the goal of the action exert the same influence on SoA during free and cued actions.

It has been suggested that agency signals generated by enactment provide memories with an enduring, episodic, marker that can successively be exploited to facilitate recall. Current theories of motor awareness highlight the role of prospective and retrospective sensorimotor cues in the construction of sense of agency (SA). To explore how these signals impact on memory for actions, we studied the effect of enactment in a patient with complete loss of somatic sensation below nose level, and compared her performance to that of a group of neurologically intact individuals.

Even at low to moderate doses, ingestion of the widely used recreational drug alcohol (ethanol) can impact cognitive and emotional processing. Recent studies show that the sense of agency (SoA; ie, the subjective experience of voluntary control over actions) can be modulated by specific pharmacological manipulations. The SoA, as quantified by the intentional binding (IB) paradigm, is enhanced by direct or indirect dopaminergic agonists in patients with Parkinson's disease and by ketamine (an N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist) in healthy individuals.