What is wrong with the concept of “feeling” of agency?
Nagireddy Neelakanteswar Reddy and Jaison A. Manjaly
IIT Gandhinagar
1 Introduction
Sense of agency (SoA) is operationally understood as (a) the
experience or judgment of ‘me’ or some ‘other’ as the cause of action
and its effects, and/or (b) the experience or judgment of intensity
(from low to high) of agency/control over action
- Recent research in SoA differentiates between implicit “feeling” of
agency and explicit “judgment” of agency (Synofzik, Vosgerau &
Newen, 2008)
- Measures of agency: Implicit – e.g., Sensory attenuation, Intentional
binding; Explicit- e.g., Verbal-report
- Category mistakes in SoA domain: Confusions in demarcating
between intention, temporal awareness (as in intentional binding),
voluntary (VS stimulus-driven) action and the SoA; They are all,
mistakenly, categorized under the concept of SoA!
3- Reasons to doubt whether there is feeling of agency at all
- Introspection that phenomenal feeling of agency is never a content of
consciousness
- There is neural correlate for non-agency (Haggard & Chambon, 2012),
but, no clarity over neural correlates of feeling of agency (David, 2012)
- Implicit measures could be measuring something else; For example,
intentional binding is measuring awareness of time
- Over emphasis on motor actions in SoA experiments and over emphasis
on the Comparator model in SoA explanations
- No clarity whether the agency over non-motor (e.g., thought) events
involve comparator (Vosgerau & Newen, 2007) and its neural correlates
- How can the feeling of agency be an input to judgment, when it can be
influenced through retrospective factors? (Moore, Wegner & Haggard,
2009)
- SoA falls under ‘metacognition’ domain (Metcalfe & Greene, 2007), but
not under ‘consciousness’ domain
5 If there is no feeling of agency, then …
- The concept of proprioception can take the explanatory role of feeling of
agency and the Comparator
- Legitimate and exclusive search for neural correlates of SoA, without over
relying on the neural correlates of Comparator mechanism
- Non-spurious ontology of SoA
Can the existence of the judgment of agency be also questioned?
- Attribution of SoA by experimental subjects may not be veridical (Wegner,
2002)
- Attributions of agency in SoA experiments could be based in totally different
cognitive phenomena; e.g., emotional valence of actions can modulate SoA
(Wilke, Synofzik & Linder, 2012) and there is self-serving bias in agency
attribution (Morewedge, 2009; Dijksterhuis et al., 2008)
Conclusion
- Ontology of SoA is driven by ill-founded models and methodological
measures; and, a thorough conceptual analysis is required in SoA domain
2 - Intention, intentional binding and SoA are theorized to be
implemented by mechanisms involved in motor control, particularly by
‘Comparator model’ (Frith, Blakemore & Wolpert, 2000)
- According to the Comparator model, SoA is due to prospective,
predictive processes; but, according to Wegner’s (2002) ‘Apparent
mental causation model’, SoA is due to retrospective, inferential
processes (Synofzik, Vosgerau & Voss, 2013)
- Comparator model is more successful in explaining feeling of agency,
while Wegner’s model is more successful in explaining judgment of
agency
- So, ‘Optimal cue integration’ model (Synofzik, Vosgerau & Linder,
2009) is proposed synthesizing both prospective and retrospective
aspects of SoA
- Now, SoA is hypothesized to occur at two stages – 1st at feeling level
and 2nd at judgment level; Also, feeling becomes an input to judgment
4- Assumption of feeling of agency and Comparator explanation for it are in
actuality based in judgments (i.e., verbal reports) of agency in
psychopathological conditions such as anarchic hand and schizophrenia
etc.,
- If the feeling of agency is non-conceptual, what warrants that it is about
agency at all?
- Comparator model (as well as Wegner’s model) fail to account for the
difference between ‘no self-agency’ and misattribution to ‘other-agency’
(Synofzik, Vosgerau & Newen, 2008)
Is the Intentional binding (IB) a legitimate measure of SoA?
- IB (Haggard, Clark & Kalogeras, 2002) is a measure of temporal
awareness, but not of SoA
- IB effect does not not represent SoA (Ebert & Wegner, 2010), but a
perception of causation (Buehner, 2012; Hughes, Desantis & Waszak,
2013)
- No clarity whether there is IB effect over non-motor events
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