The Sense of Agency

Edited by Patrick Haggard and Baruch Eitam

Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience

Offers a wide-ranging experimental and theoretical investigation of the human sense of agency, featuring perspectives from social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry, and philosophy of mind
Addresses important questions for future research such as: What role does agency play in the sense of self? Is agency based on predicting outcomes of actions? What are the links between agency and motivation?
Cuts across disciplines and theoretical disagreements, providing insights and authoritative reviews of empirical research from leading investigators of the sense of agency

The Sense of Agency

Edited by Patrick Haggard and Baruch Eitam

Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience

Description

Agency has two meanings in psychology and neuroscience. It can refer to one's capacity to affect the world and act in line with one's goals and desires—this is the objective aspect of agency. But agency can also refer to the subjective experience of controlling one's actions, or how it feels to achieve one's goals or affect the world. This subjective aspect is known as the sense of agency, and it is an important part of what makes us human.

Interest in the sense of agency has exploded since the early 2000s, largely because scientists have learned that it can be studied objectively through analyses of human judgment, behavior, and the brain. This book brings together some of the world's leading researchers to give structure to this nascent but rapidly growing field. The contributors address questions such as: What role does agency play in the sense of self? Is agency based on predicting outcomes of actions? And what are the links between agency and motivation?

Recent work on the sense of agency has been markedly interdisciplinary. The chapters collected here combine ideas and methods from fields as diverse as engineering, psychology, neurology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, making the book a valuable resource for any student or researcher interested in action, volition, and exploring how mind and brain are organized.

The Sense of Agency

Edited by Patrick Haggard and Baruch Eitam

Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience

Introduction
Part I. Volition
1. Time to Act: The Dynamics of Agentive Experiences
Elisabeth Pacherie
2. Deconstructing Voluntary Action: Unconscious and Conscious Component Processes
Lara C. Krisst, Carlos Montemayor, and Ezequiel Morsella
3. Action Control by If-then Plans: Explicating the Mechanisms of Strategic Automaticity
Torsten Martiny-Huenger, Sarah E. Martiny, and Peter M. Gollwitzer
4. Neural Correlates of Intentions
Roee Gilron, Shiri Simon, and Roy Mukamel
5. Explicit and Implicit Beliefs, Attitudes, and Intentions: The Role of Conscious and Unconscious Processes in Human Behavior
Icek Ajzen and Nilanjana Dasgupta
6. The Neural Basis Underlying the Experience of Control in the Human Brain
Lauren A. Leotti, Catherine Cho, and Mauricio R. Delgado
7. Goals and the Sense of Agency: The Case of Goal Conflict
Tali Kleiman
Part II. Determining Authorship
8. Inference Processes Underlying the Human Experience of Agency over Operant Actions
Myrthel Dogge and Henk Aarts
9. Agency and Outcome Prediction
Antje Gentsch and Simone Schütz-Bosbach
10. The Relations between Agency and Body-Ownership: Additive or Independent?
Manos Tsakiris
11. Innate Experience of Self-Agency
Philippe Rochat
12. Motivation from Control: A Response Selection Framework
Noam Karsh and Baruch Eitam
Part III. Beyond Authorship
13. Comparators and Weightings: Neurocognitive Accounts of Agency
Matthis Synofzik
14. Action Control and the Sense of Agency
Bernhard Hommel
15. Control and Truth Working Together: The Agentic Experience "Going in the Right Direction"
E. Tory Higgins
Part IV. Disturbances
16. Sense of Agency and Its Disruption: Clinical and Computational Perspectives
Paul Fletcher and Aikaterini Fotopoulou
17. Action Generation, Intention, and Agency in Motor and Body Awareness Deficits
Anna Berti, Francesca Garbarini, and Lorenzo Pia
18. Disorders of Volition from Neurological Disease: Altered Awareness of Action in Neurological Disorders
James B. Rowe and Noham Wolpe
Index

The Sense of Agency

Edited by Patrick Haggard and Baruch Eitam

Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience

Author Information

Edited by Patrick Haggard, Professor in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology, University College London, and Edited by Baruch Eitam, Professor of Psychology, University of Haifa

Patrick Haggard is Professor in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology at University College London.

Baruch Eitam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Haifa, Israel.

Contributors:

Henk Aarts
University Medical Centrum Utrecht
Utrecht University
Utrecht, the Netherlands

Icek Ajzen
Department of Psychology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Amherst, MA

Anna Berti
SAMBA (SpAtial, Motor & Bodily Awareness) Research Group
Psychology Department
University of Turin
Turin, Italy

Catherine Cho
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University, Newark
Newark, NJ

Nilanjana Dasgupta
Department of Psychology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Amherst, MA

Mauricio R. Delgado
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University, Newark
Newark, NJ

Myrthel Dogge
University Medical Centrum Utrecht
Utrecht University
Utrecht, the Netherlands

Baruch Eitam
Department of Psychology
University of Haifa
Haifa, Israel

Fletcher PC
Dept of Psychiatry
CEHP Research Department, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK

Katerina Fotopoulou
Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology
Psychoanalysis Unit
University College London
London, UK

Francesca Garbarini
SAMBA (SpAtial, Motor & Bodily Awareness) Research Group
Psychology Department
University of Turin
Turin, Italy

Antje Gentsch
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Leipzig, Germany

Roee Gilron
School of Psychological Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience
Tel-Aviv University
Tel-Aviv, Israel

Peter M. Gollwitzer
Department of Psychology
New York University
New York, NY

E. Tory Higgins
Columbia University
New York, NY

Bernhard Hommel
Department of Cognitive Psychology
Leiden University
Leiden, Germany

Noam Karsh
Department of Psychology
University of Haifa
Haifa, Israel

Tali Kleiman
Department of Psychology
New York University
New York, NY

Lara C. Krisst
Department of Psychology
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA

Lauren A. Leotti
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University, Newark
Newark, NJ

Sarah E. Martiny
University of Tromsø
Tromsø, Norway

Torsten Martiny-Huenger
University of Konstanz
Konstanz, Germany

Carlos Montemayor
Department of Philosophy
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA

Ezequiel Morsella
Department of Neurology
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA

Roy Mukamel
School of Psychological Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience
Tel-Aviv University
Tel-Aviv, Israel

Elisabeth Pacherie
Institut Jean Nicod
Ecole Normale Supérieure
Paris, France

Lorenzo Pia
SAMBA (SpAtial, Motor & Bodily Awareness) Research Group
Psychology Department
University of Turin
Turin, Italy

Philippe Rochat
Emory University
Atlanta, GA

James B. Rowe
Department of Clinical Neurosciences
University of Cambridge
Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
Cambridge
Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK

Simone Schütz-Bosbach
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Leipzig, Germany

Shiri Simon
School of Psychological Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience
Tel-Aviv University
Tel-Aviv, Israel

Matthis Synofzik
Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research
University of Tübingen
German Research Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE)
University of Tübingen
Tübingen, Germany

Noham Wolpe
Department of Clinical Neurosciences
University of Cambridge
Medical Research Council
Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
Cambridge, UK