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Sense of agency in the human brain

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 18, pages 196–207 (2017)Cite this article

Subjects

Key Points

  • Sense of agency refers to the feeling of controlling one's own actions and, through them, events in the external world.

  • Sense of agency can be measured in experimental settings by asking participants to explicitly judge whether their action caused an outcome event or by using implicit measures, such as the compression of perceived time between action and outcome.

  • Current models of motor control propose that the sense of agency is established retrospectively, by comparing delayed sensory feedback about actions and their consequences with the feedback predicted by an internal model. The connectivity between the frontal areas that develop motor plans for voluntary action and the parietal areas that monitor outcomes plays a key part in computing sense of agency.

  • Processes in the frontal cortex occurring before the initiation of action also contribute to sense of agency. For example, selecting which of a number of alternative actions to make can increase the sense of agency over the subsequent outcome. These frontal contributions to agency operate prospectively and underlie the metacognitive experience of one's own voluntary action.

  • Several neuropsychiatric disorders involve distorted or unreliable sense of agency. This suggests that successful computation of agency by the brain is a key element of normal consciousness and mental health.

  • Many key features of modern human societies, such as social responsibility or use of advanced technologies, are based on the ability of the brain to compute agency correctly, even in complex interactions.

Abstract

In adult life, people normally know what they are doing. This experience of controlling one's own actions and, through them, the course of events in the outside world is called 'sense of agency'. It forms a central feature of human experience; however, the brain mechanisms that produce the sense of agency have only recently begun to be investigated systematically. This recent progress has been driven by the development of better measures of the experience of agency, improved design of cognitive and behavioural experiments, and a growing understanding of the brain circuits that generate this distinctive but elusive experience. The sense of agency is a mental and neural state of cardinal importance in human civilization, because it is frequently altered in psychopathology and because it underpins the concept of responsibility in human societies.

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Figure 1: Explicit judgments of agency.
Figure 2: Measuring sense of agency implicitly.
Figure 3: The comparator model for neural control of action and agency.
Figure 4: Prospective and retrospective agency.
Figure 5: Coercion reduces sense of agency.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant HUMVOL (agreement number 323943) and by a grant from Arts & Humanity Research Council (AHRC) (number AH/L015145/1). The article benefitted from a fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies (France), with the financial support of the French State managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, programme “Investissements d'avenir” (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+). The author thanks E. Brann for comments and assistance.

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  1. Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR, UK

    Patrick Haggard

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Correspondence to Patrick Haggard.

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PowerPoint slides

Glossary

Instrumental control

The capacity to initiate an action and thus bring about an intended change in the environment.

Volition

The process of preparing, initiating and executing an action under one's own control. Traditionally, the hallmark of volitional action is that the agent 'could have done otherwise', implying that the action was not directly caused by the current stimulus environment.

Mirror self-recognition

The capacity to recognize a visual percept as being related to one's own body. This has traditionally been assessed by a test in which a coloured mark is placed on a body location, such as the forehead, and subsequently viewed via a mirror. Only if the animal recognizes the body in the mirror as its own, will it try to remove the mark.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

(TMS). A technique in which a strong magnetic field is applied to the scalp to influence neural activity in a cortical area beneath. If ongoing cognitive performance is impaired, the affected cortical area is assumed to be necessary for the task.

Transcranial direct current stimulation

(TDCS). A non-invasive brain stimulation technique in which a small current passes between electrodes that are positioned on the scalp. Anodal stimulation is thought to increase excitability of the underlying cortex, whereas cathodal stimulation may reduce excitability.

Efference copy

A copy of the outgoing (efferent) motor command from the brain to the muscles. An efference copy, in conjunction with a forward model, can be used to predict the sensory consequences of action.

Prediction error

The difference between the actual outcome of an action and the predicted outcome. Neural signalling of prediction error can be used to adjust and improve performance, and also to learn how to improve future predictions.

Event-related potential

An electrical potential that is generated in the brain as a consequence of neuronal activity becoming synchronized by the external stimulus. Event-related potentials are recorded by averaging electroencephalographic measurements recorded at the scalp and time-locked to a stimulus, and consist of precisely timed sequences of waves or 'components', which may each reflect a specific cognitive process in the brain.

Instrumental actions

Actions that produce a direct or indirect consequence on an animal's external environment. The transformation of the environment is the goal of the action.

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Haggard, P. Sense of agency in the human brain. Nat Rev Neurosci 18, 196–207 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.14

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