Self-agency, also known as the phenomenal will, is the sense that actions are self-generated. Scientist Benjamin Libet was the first to study it, concluding that brain activity predicts the action before one even has conscious awareness of his or her intention to act upon that action (see Neuroscience of free will). However an empirical study in 2019 shows that readiness potentials (agent-independent brain activity) were absent for deliberate decisions, and preceded arbitrary decisions only.[1] Daniel Wegner defined the three criteria of self-agency: priority, exclusivity, and consistency. According to Wegner, priority means that an action must be planned before the action is initiated. The interval between the action and the effect is known as the intentional binding. Another criterion for self-agency is exclusivity, which means the effect is due to the person's action and not because of other potential causes for the effect. The last criterion Wegner suggested was consistency. Consistency means that one's planned action must occur as planned. Internal motor cues are also an indicator in deciding whether an action occurred through self-agency, and can be measured by the generation of movement. If the predicted sensory state matches the actual sensory state, then self-agency has likely occurred. No models that predict agency have ever been proven.
Self-agency as inference under uncertainty Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel conducted a seminal work on the perception of external causal events. Work on attribution of agency to oneself, however, began with Benjamin Libet's conclusion that brain activity predictive of action precedes conscious awareness of the intention to act, which was later refuted (Neuroscience of free will). Since this demonstration psychologists have been trying to determine the relationship between the sense of agency, also known as the phenomenal will, and actual self-agency. Daniel Wegner's book The Illusion of Conscious Will (Illusion of control) posits the phenomenal will as the illusory product of post hoc inference. Sense of agency, on this view, is a product of fallible post hoc inference rather than infallible direct access to one's conscious force of will. The attribution of self-agency is made most strongly when the following three conditions are met: priority, exclusivity, and consistency. Thus, one's action must be the exclusive potential cause of the event (exclusivity), one must have had prior thoughts or plans about the action before it occurred (priority), and the action that occurred must match the action that was planned (consistency). An inference of self-agency is thus made under at least three parameters of uncertainty. On the contrary, neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell believes that self-agency (free will) is real and biologically grounded, not an illusion. He argues that freedom exists in degrees, emerging through evolution as living beings gained more control, self-modeling, and capacity for conscious choice. For Mitchell, agency means the brain’s ability to pause, reflect, and select actions based on goals and values, even within biological and environmental constraints.[2]
Uncertainty in Wegner’s three conditions: postdictive accounts of agency Most studies of self-attribution of agency can be categorized as examining one or more of Wegner's three conditions of priority, exclusivity, and consistency. By manipulating these three parameters in systematic ways, researchers have shed light on the role that each plays in self-attributions of agency.
Priority Wegner suggests that temporal order is critical to attributions of self-agency; the agent must have planned or thought about the event/action before it occurred it in order to feel that he has willed it. This is a natural extension of the commonsense notion that a cause cannot occur after its effect. However, a range of findings have shown that, beyond the basic requirement of cause preceding effect, the specifics of the timing are important. Moreover, judgments of timing (and thus priority) can be influenced by variation of other parameters, chiefly Wegner's consistency condition. The experience of causing an event alters the subjective experience of their timing. For instance, actions are perceived as temporally shifted towards their effects when they are performed volitionally, but not when involuntarily evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation. This distortion of the perceived interval between movement and effect is known as intentional binding and is considered an implicit measure of the sense of agency. Moore, Wegner, and Haggard in 2009 show that supraliminal priming affects intentional binding. This effect contains an inferential postdictive component, because the effect shifts the perceived time of action, even when the probability of the effect's occurrence is low. Gentsch and Schütz-Bosbach in 2011 find top–down modulation of visual event-related potentials by both self agency and priming of self-agency, suggesting that both efferent information and prior thoughts about action consequence inform the sense of agency. Furthermore, Engbert et al. in 2008 showed that intentional binding occurred only when the movement of the response lever was actively generated by the subject; passive movements (initiated by the response lever) did not result in intentional binding. They take these results to suggest that efferent motor commands, rather than just priority and consistency, is key to self-agency attributions. Intentional binding may not be exclusive to self-agency, however; Strother, House, and Sukhvinder (2010) found intentional binding in a shared action situation where other agents with similar goals and actions were present.
Exclusivity Wegner's exclusivity condition posits that attribution of self-agency occurs most strongly in the absence of other potential causes. The presence of other potential causes in temporal and spatial proximity to the event will, all else being equal, result in a diminished sense of self-agency. Dijksterhuis and colleagues in 2008 found that nonconscious priming with first-person singular pronouns increased feelings of self-agency, while nonconscious priming with other potential causes (computer, God) decreased feelings of self-agency. Hindriks et al. in 2011 have proposed a computational Bayesian inference model of self-attribution of agency that deals mainly with the exclusivity dimension.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
