The sense of agency (SoA), or sense of control, is the subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world. It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movement(s) or thinking thoughts. In non-pathological experience, the SoA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership" (SoO), which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm (while you remained passive) you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership (SoO) for that movement. However, you would not have felt that you were the author of the movement; you would not have a sense of agency (SoA). Normally SoA and SoO are tightly integrated, such that while typing one has an enduring, embodied, and tacit sense that "my own fingers are doing the moving" (SoO) and that "the typing movements are controlled (or volitionally directed) by me" (SoA). In patients with certain forms of pathological experience (e.g., schizophrenia) the integration of SoA and SoO may become disrupted in some manner. In this case, movements may be executed or thoughts made manifest, for which the patient with schizophrenia has a sense of ownership, but not a sense of agency. Regarding SoA for both motor movements and thoughts, further distinctions may be found in both first-order (immediate, pre-reflective) experience and higher-order (reflective or introspective) consciousness. For example, while typing one has a sense of control and thus SoA for the ongoing action of typing; this is an example of SoA in first-order experience which is immediate and prior to any explicit intellectual reflection upon the typing actions themselves. In this case, the individual is not focusing on the typing movements per se but rather, intimately involved with the task at hand. If one is subsequently asked if they just performed the action of typing, they can -correctly- attribute agency to themselves. This is an example of a higher-order, reflective, conscious "attribution" of agency, which is a derivative notion stemming from the immediate, pre-reflective "sense" of agency.
Definition The concept of agency implies an active organism, one who desires, makes plans, and carries out actions. The sense of agency plays a pivotal role in cognitive development, including the first stage of self-awareness (or pre-theoretical experience of one's own mentality), which scaffolds theory of mind capacities. Indeed, the ability to recognize oneself as the agent of a behavior is the way the self builds as an entity independent from the external world. The sense of agency and its scientific study has important implications in social cognition, moral reasoning, and psychopathology. The conceptual distinction between SoA and SoO was defined by philosopher and phenomenologist Shaun Gallagher. Using a different terminology, essentially the same distinction has been made by John Campbell, and Lynn Stephens and George Graham.
Psychological measures Sense of agency is difficult to measure because individuals are often not aware of their sense of agency while performing tasks. An implicit measure of agency relies on intentional binding an effect where the perceived time between related events is decreased. Other implicit measures rely on sensory attenuation to voluntary acts, where one perceives sensations related to voluntary acts less. Explicit measures can depend upon self-report or perceived responsibility for an outcome.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
