Title: Sensory prediction and the sense of agency, from individual to joint action

Abstract:

During voluntary action, forward models in the brain pre-activate representations of the predicted sensory consequences. These forward models are believed to play important roles in motor control and the sense of agency (SA), i.e. registration that one was the initiator or controller of the action. The majority of the literature on sensory prediction and its relation to SA has focused on individual action. An open question is whether, during joint actions, such forward models can be re-purposed to predict the additive consequences of multiple actors, for example two individuals trying to steer a moving object by coordinating their motor inputs, and how this relates to each actor’s SA. In this talk, I will present an overview of previous research, and outline plans for two upcoming studies to investigate sensory prediction and SA in the joint action context. The first study will investigate the impact of joint action on implicit and explicit measures of agency, by testing whether the additive consequences of two actors’ actions are attenuated by expectation (as would be expected by a forward model), and by comparing explicit agency judgments in the individual and joint action contexts. The second study will investigate whether SA for joint actions depends primarily on the match between one’s individual action and the sensory consequences, or alternatively, on the satisfaction of joint action goals. The proposed research would combine insights from the agency and joint action literatures to develop theories for why people may feel more or less responsible for the outcomes of group actions.