Search

If you expect that your action causes a near effect, you perceive the action and the effect as closer in time than they really are. This phenomenon is called temporal binding and is considered an implicit measure of the sense of agency, namely the sense of being the author of an action or action awareness. Recent studies, however, show that temporal binding occurs even without the agent executing any action and depends on the capacity to represent one event as the cause of another one. These studies demand the reexamination of the sense of agency, and of temporal binding as its diagnostic tool. I propose a causal view of the sense of agency, according to which action awareness arises when your action is represented as causing an effect. Because representing an action as causing outcomes affects time perception creating the illusion of event proximity, the causal view explains and operationalizes the sense of agency through the connection between causality and time, thus overcoming the indeterminacy of previous accounts. The causal view can pave the way to novel experimental perspectives in development and evolution and stimulate new thinking on the relationship between subjectivity, causal cognition, and time perception. Introduction - Temporal binding with intentions and causes - The causal representation involved in the binding effect - Sense of agency and variety of intentional actions - A causal view of the sense of agency - Action awareness and causal representations in development and evolution Conclusion

Continual enrichments in auditory interfaces of desktop applications allow visually impaired people to successfully use computers in education, employment, and social interaction. Designers face multiple challenges while producing sound for auditory interfaces. This paper presents a new method of adaptive auditory feedback, which converts speech-only instructions to non-speech (i.e., spearcons), based on users’ interaction with the application in the desktop environment. Using within-subject design, fifteen participants (i.e., visually impaired) were involved in the study. Results from the study demonstrate that the adaptive auditory feedback method is more efficient than non-speech and more pleasurable with respect to repetitive speech-only instructions. Furthermore, adaptive auditory feedback improves task completion time and action awareness as compared to speech-only. Lastly, these findings may benefit researchers and developers to use adaptive auditory feedback, instead of using speech-only or non-speech feedback while designing auditory feedback for interfaces in desktop environment for the people with visual impairment.

Dopaminergic deficiency in Parkinson’s disease (PD) has been associated with underactivation of the supplementary motor area and a reduction of voluntary actions. In these patients, awareness of intention to act has been shown to be delayed. However, delayed awareness of intention to act has also been shown in patients with hyperdopaminergic states and an excess of unwilled movements, as in Tourette’s, and in patients with functional movement disorders. Hence, the role of dopamine in the awareness of intention and action remains unclear. 36 PD patients were tested ON and OFF dopaminergic medication and compared with 35 healthy age-matched controls. In addition, 17 PD patients with subthalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS) were tested ON medication and ON and OFF stimulation. Participants judged either the moment a self-generated action was performed, or the moment the urge to perform the action was felt, using the “Libet method”. Temporal judgments of intention and action awareness were comparable between unmedicated PD patients and controls. Dopaminergic medication boosted anticipatory awareness of both intentions and actions in PD patients, relative to an unmedicated condition. The difference between ON/OFF DBS was not statistically reliable. Functional improvement of motor ability in PD through dopaminergic supplementation leads to earlier awareness of both intention, and of voluntary action. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00221-020-05847-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The Kohnstamm phenomenon refers to the observation that if one pushes the arm hard outwards against a fixed surface for about 30 s, and then moves away from the surface and relaxes, an involuntary movement of the arm occurs, accompanied by a feeling of lightness. Central, peripheral and hybrid theories of the Kohnstamm phenomenon have been advanced. Afferent signals may be irrelevant if purely central theories hold. Alternatively, according to peripheral accounts, altered afferent signalling actually drives the involuntary movement. Hybrid theories suggest afferent signals control a centrally-programmed aftercontraction via negative position feedback control or positive force feedback control. The Kohnstamm phenomenon has provided an important scientific method for comparing voluntary with involuntary movement, both with respect to subjective experience, and for investigating whether involuntary movements can be brought under voluntary control. A full review of the literature reveals that a hybrid model best explains the Kohnstamm phenomenon. On this model, a central adaptation interacts with afferent signals at multiple levels of the motor hierarchy. The model assumes that a Kohnstamm generator sends output via the same pathways as voluntary movement, yet the resulting movement feels involuntary due to a lack of an efference copy to cancel against sensory inflow. This organisation suggests the Kohnstamm phenomenon could represent an amplification of neuromotor processes normally involved in automatic postural maintenance. Future work should determine which afferent signals contribute to the Kohnstamm phenomenon, the location of the Kohnstamm generator, and the principle of feedback control operating during the aftercontraction.

Awareness of action is a pervasive personal experience that is crucial in understanding self-generated and other-generated actions as well as their effects. A large body of research suggests that action awareness, as measured by the magnitude of temporal binding between an action and its effect in an operant action task (i.e., intentional binding), is rooted in the human capacity to experience self-agency and establish action intentions. Whereas previous research mainly addressed the role of intentionality itself in these socially well-shared experiences, in the present study we focused specifically on one important aspect of it: the quality or strength of action intentions. We expected and established that stronger intentions increase intentional binding. Specifically, the magnitude of the binding effect, as assessed by the Libet clock task in which two actions were followed by the same neutral tone, was elevated for the action that was enacted with stronger intentions. We briefly discuss the implications of the observed role of intentional strength in temporal binding between action and effect, for promoting a better understanding and examination of how the concept of intentionality is associated with action awareness in general, and the experience of being the agent of one’s own actions in particular.

The perceived temporal order of actions and changes in the environment is crucial for our inferences of causality. Sensory events presented shortly after an action are more likely considered as self-generated compared to the same events occurring before action execution. However, the estimation of when an action or a sensory change occurred is a challenge for the human brain. This estimation is formed from available sensory information combined with internal representations. Researchers suggested that internal signals associated with action preparation drive our awareness of initiating an action. This study aimed to directly investigate this hypothesis. Participants performed a speeded action (left or right key-press) in response to a go-signal (left or right arrow). A flash was presented at different time points around the time of the action, and participants judged whether it was simultaneous with the action or not. To investigate the role of action preparation in time perception, we compared trials where a cue indicated which action to perform in response to a later go signal presentation, and trials with a neutral cue where participants did not know until the time of the go signal which action to perform. We observed that a flash presented before the action was reported as simultaneous with the action more frequently when actions were cued than when they were uncued. This difference was not observed when the action was replaced by a tactile stimulation. These results indicate that precued actions are experienced earlier in time compared to unprepared actions. Further, this difference is not due to mere non-motor expectation of an event. The experience of initiating an action is driven by action preparation process: when we know what to do, actions are perceived ahead of time. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00221-018-5292-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Diabetes exerts its greatest toll on the vascular system, causing micro- and macrovascular complications of the heart and circulatory system. This article explores the awareness of a group of people with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes of symptomatic myocardial infarction, and what action they would take if they experienced any of these. Aim: To explore awareness of potential myocardial infarction symptoms in a group of people with diabetes and to determine what action they would take. Method: A convenience sample of 21 non-NHS participants with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes took part in two focus groups. Results: Thematic data analysis identified the emergence of three main issues: recognising symptoms such as chest pain; not taking the symptoms of a potential myocardial infarction seriously; and reluctance to dial 999. Conclusions: This small-scale focus group study indicates that not all people with diabetes might take symptoms of potential myocardial infarction seriously or seek emergency help.

The concept of self-generated action is controversial, despite extensive study of its neural basis. Why is this concept so troublesome? We analyse the concept of self-generated action as employed by Passingham, Bengtsson, and Lau (2010a, 2010b). There are two definitions of self-generated action; as operant action and as underdetermined action. The latter draws on subjective experience. Experiments on action awareness suggest that experience may not be a good guide for defining self-generated action. Nevertheless, we agree with Passingham and colleagues that self-generated actions exist distinct from operant actions. But defining 'self-generated' by the degree of involvement of an endogenous process risks regress. We sketch an alternative account of self-generated action that tries to avoid these problems to make self-generated actions accessible to experimental science.

In a pair of recent papers and his new book, Christopher Peacocke (2007, 2008a, 2008b) takes up and defends the claim that our awareness of our own actions is immediate and not perceptually based, and extends it into the domain of mental action.1 He aims to provide an account of action-awareness that will generalize to explain how we have immediate awareness of our own judgments, decisions, imaginings, and so forth. These claims form an important component in a much larger philosophical edifice, with many implications for the philosophy of mind and for epistemology. The present paper advances multiple criticisms of Peacocke's account. In particular, it shows that he has given insufficient grounds for thinking that we have non-perceptual awareness of our own actions; and it shows that the account of action-awareness that he provides does not, in any case, generalize to mental actions of the sort that he intends. 1There is extensive overlap between the two articles and Chapter 7 of Peacocke's book ...

It has been hypothesized that an internal model is involved in controlling and recognizing one’s own actions (action attribution). This results from a comparison process between the predicted sensory feedback of the action and its real sensory consequences. The aim of the present study is to distinguish the respective importance of two action parameters (time and direction) on such an attribution judgment.We used a device that allows introduction of discordance between the movements actually performed and the sensory feedback displayed on a computer screen. Participants were asked to judge whether they were viewing (1) their own movements, (2) their own movements modified (spatially or temporally displaced), or (3) those of another agent (i.e, the experimenter). In fact, in all conditions they were only shown their own movements either unaltered or modified by varying amounts in space or time.Movements were only attributed to another agent when therewas a high spatial discordance between participants’ hand movements and sensory feedback. This study is the first to show that the direction of movements is a cardinal feature in action attribution, whereas temporal properties of movements play a less important role.

Recently, the researches based on vision about user attention and action awareness are being pushed actively for human computer interaction. Among them, various applications of tabletop display system are developed more in accordance with touch sensing technique, co-located and collaborative work. Formerly, although supported only one user, support multi-user at present. Therefore, collaborative work and interaction of four elements (human, computer, displayed objects, physical objects) that is ultimate goal of tabletop display are realizable. Generally, tabletop display system designs according to four key aspects. 1)multi-touch interaction using bare hands. 2)implementation of collaborative work, simultaneous user interaction. 3)direct touch interaction. 4)use of physical objects as an interaction tool. In this paper, we describe a critical analysis of the state-of-the-art in advanced multi-touch sensing techniques for tabletop display system according to the four methods: vision based method, non-vision based method, top-down projection system and rear projection system. And we also discuss some problems and practical applications in the research field.

Although database management systems (DBMSs) enforce access control according to a variety of models (see [2] for an overview), the majority of them do not integrate native privacy protection mechanisms. This void has been partially filled out with the advent of purpose based access control, as this access control model has brought to the integration of basic privacy preservation functionalities into DBMSs. Even though purposes represent a key feature of privacy policies, DBMSs' privacy awareness can be significantly increased considering additional privacy related aspects. With this work we do a step to achieve this goal by focusing on the actions performed by queries on data and the categories of the accessed data. We propose an access control model that supports highly customized privacyaware access control policies and significantly improves the basic privacy preservation capabilities of the purpose based model. The proposed model is complemented with an efficient enforcement monitor, which can be easily integrated into relational DBMSs. Early experimental evaluations show the efficiency of the proposed framework.

The execution of a ballistic movement within a reaction time task paradigm is significantly speeded up when an unexpected startling auditory stimulus (SAS) is delivered together with the imperative signal. Using Libet's clock, we investigated whether acceleration involves also the subjective appraisal of the time of task execution. In trials containing the SAS, reaction time shortened to 68.7% of control values. However, subjective judgment of task execution remained a similar time with respect to the imperative signal as in control trials. The dissociation between task execution and its subjective perception indicates the existence of separate circuits for action execution and action awareness.

International audience; Many everyday skills are unconsciously learned through repetitions of the same behaviour by binding independent motor acts into unified sets of actions. However, our ability to be consciously aware of producing newly and highly trained motor skills raises the question of the role played by conscious awareness of action upon skill acquisition. In this study we strengthened conscious awareness of self-produced sequential finger movements by way of asking participants to judge their performance in terms of maximal fluency after each trial. Control conditions in which participants did not make any judgment or performance-unrelated judgments were also included. Findings indicate that conscious awareness of action, enhanced via subjective appraisal of motor efficiency, potentiates sensorimotor learning and skilful motor production in optimising the processing and sequencing of action units, as compared to the control groups. The current work lends support to the claim that the learning and skilful expression of sensorimotor behaviours might be grounded upon our ability to be consciously aware of our own motor capability and efficiency.

In this short review, we focus on symptoms related to body representation and action awareness in two major Psychiatric Diseases: Anorexia Nervosa and Schizophrenia. First, the neurocognitive processes underlying pathological body image distortion in anorexia nervosa and delusions of alien control in schizophrenia are presented briefly. We then consider the impact of recent research findings on the development of novel forms of therapy for each of the two diseases. Greatest awareness of the latest research on neurocognitive impairments in anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia may help a therapist to better understand a patient’s subjective experience. In turn, this might help the patient to better understand and thus better deal with his/her cognitive symptoms.

International audience; The auditory N1 event-related potential has previously been observed to be attenuated for tones that are triggered by human actions. This attenuation is thought to be generated by motor prediction mechanisms and is considered to be important for agency attribution. The present study was designed to rigorously test the notion of action prediction-based sensory attenuation. Participants performed one of four voluntary actions on each trial, with each button associated with either predictable or unpredictable action effects. In addition, actions with each hand could result in action effects that were either congruent or incongruent with hand-specific prediction. We observed no significant differences in N1 amplitude between predictable and unpredictable tones. When contrasting action effects that were congruent or incongruent with hand-specific prediction, we observed significant attenua-tion for prediction-congruent compared to prediction-incongruent action-effects. These novel findings suggest that accurate action-effect prediction drives sensory attenuation of auditory stimuli. These findings have important implications for understanding the mechanisms of action-effect prediction and sensory attenuation, and may have clinical implications for studies investigating action awareness and agency in schizophrenia.

This article offers illustrations of the action awareness and action style of transformational leaders, ranging from a World Bank executive to an artist-entrepreneur. The half dozen closely studied executives are identified as transformational leaders on the basis of their late-stage scores on a developmental measure. Their sensitivity to current conditions, and their ability to analogize across the domains of mission, strategy, own action and outcomes, suggest that their ongoing action awareness is consistent with a “chaos theory” appreciation of social reality.

PART ONE: THE SELF AND ITS INDIVIDUATION PART TWO: CONSCIOUSNESS, ACTION AWARENESS AND THEIR ROLE IN SELF-KNOWLEDGE PART THREE: SELF-KNOWLEDGE. ROBUST OR FRAGILE?

The sense that I am the author of my own actions, including the ability to distinguish my own from other people's actions, is a fundamental building block of our sense of self, on the one hand, and successful social interactions, on the other. Using cognitive neuroscience techniques, researchers have attempted to elucidate the functional basis of this intriguing phenomenon, also trying to explain pathological abnormalities of action awareness in certain psychiatric and neurological disturbances. Recent conceptual, technological, and methodological advances suggest several interesting and necessary new leads for future research on the neuroscience of agency. Here I will describe new frontiers for the field such as the need for novel and multifactorial paradigms, anatomically plausible network models for the sense of agency, investigations of the temporal dynamics during agentic processing and ecologically valid virtual reality (VR) applications.

How do I know it was me who moved? A recent experimental study illustrates the contribution of one's body schema and awareness of one's own actions to self-recognition. The results provide evidence that bodily cues and action cues are important in self-recognition, and they demonstrate that action cues overrule bodily cues.

Background The current study tries to understand the psychopathology of passivity and hallucinatory symptoms, which are symptoms sometimes signified by their conscious experience of attaching internally generated contend to external source. This study focuses on the postulated deficit of patients with these symptoms, and suggests that the specific deficit in action awareness is psychopathologically important and wishes to develop a simple task for clincal assessment. Method 19 healthy control, 19 psychotic patients control and 19 psychotic patients with the relevant symptoms were recruited in the studiy. Their clinical, social, cognitive, side-effect and motor condition were assessed, and the main experiment task was conducted. In the task, the participants were asked to replicate their own actions in conditions: (1) being passively moved; (2) moving voluntarily and (3) being instructed. The inaccuracy of the replication was recorded, and 1 supplementary experiment was conducted for confounders. Result After control the confounding factors, such as the cognitive deficit, result from the main and supplementary experiments suggested that patients with passivity experience and hallucinatory symptoms as a group were having deficit in the awareness of their own actions, such that they showed no improvement when acting voluntary compared to when being passively moved; while this improvement were found in other groups. Moreover, this failure in showing improvement was due to their problems in obtaining information about their own actions. Conclusion The simple paradigm developed demonstrated that patients with the relevant psychotic symptoms were closely related to a specific deficit in their awareness of actions.

As agent systems are solving more and more complex tasks in increasingly challenging domains, the systems themselves are becoming more complex too, often compromising their adaptivity and robustness. A promising approach to solve this problem is to provide agents with reflective capabilities. Agents that can reflect on the effects and expected performance of their actions, are more aware and knowledgeable of their capabilities and shortcomings.In this paper, we introduce a computational model for what we call action awareness. To achieve this awareness, agents learn predictive action models from observed experience. This knowledge is then used to optimize, transform and coordinate plans. We apply this computational model to a number of typical scenarios from robotic soccer. Various experiments on real robots demonstrate that action awareness enables the robots to improve the performance of their plans substantially.

How do I know that I am the person who is moving? According to Wittgenstein (1958), the sense of agency involves a primitive notion of the self used as subject, which does not rely on any prior perceptual identification and which is immune to error through misidentification. However, the neuroscience of action and the neuropsychology of schizophrenia show the existence of specific cognitive processes underlying the sense of agency—the ‘‘Who'' system (Georgieff & Jeannerod, 1998) which is disrupted in delusions of control (Frith, 1992). Yet, we have to be careful in the interpretation of such clinical symptoms, which cannot be so easily reduced to deficit of action monitoring or to lack of action awareness. Moreover, we should refine the definition of the sense of agency by distinguishing the sense of initiation and the sense of one's own movements. A conceptual analysis of the empirical data will lead us to establish the taxonomy of the different levels of action representations.

International audience; Since the Shea, J.B. and Morgan (1979) study, investigators have repeatedly shown that the learning of a set of movement patterns (as evaluated in a retention test) is enhanced when acquisition occurred under a random rather than a blocked schedule of practice. Supposedly, this is the case because a random schedule of practice necessitates more elaborate cognitive activities than a blocked schedule before each acquisition trial can be initiated. Our main objective was to determine whether the advantage for learning found for random practice increases as a function of the number of acquisition trials. During acquisition, the results indicated a general tendency for smaller movement reproduction errors under a blocked rather than a random schedule of practice. However, this effect disappeared with larger amount of acquisition trials. In retention, larger errors were observed when acquisition occurred under a blocked rather than a random schedule of practice. Finally, the disadvantage for learning observed for the blocked schedule of practice disappeared under a block-repeated condition in which each movement pattern was first practiced under a blocked schedule which was then repeated a second time. The results are discussed in terms of the so-called contextual interference effect and indicates some of its limitations.

The possibility of identifying the neural correlates of conscious experience excites fascination and scepticism in equal measures. A recent experiment reported by Haggard and Magno1xLocalising awareness of action with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Haggard, P. and Magno, E. Exp. Brain Res. 1999; 127: 102–107Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (85)See all References1 elicits more of the former and rather less of the latter. Haggard and Magno investigated the mechanisms that give rise to the awareness we have of our own actions. Characteristically, the awareness of an action precedes its execution. This can be shown by asking subjects to watch a rotating clock-hand while they make limb movements; subjects report that they are first aware of their own movement before an experimenter can record the first change in muscular activity (by tens of milliseconds). In their experiment, Haggard and Magno used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to see if they could separately disrupt the mechanisms of movement awareness and execution. TMS over the primary motor cortex delayed movement awareness to a lesser degree than it affected movement execution and thus the authors argued that TMS disruption had occurred after the point of subjective awareness but before movement execution. When TMS was applied over the supplementary and premotor cortices, the times of subjective awareness and the overt response were delayed by a similar amount, and it was argued that the TMS disruption was now occurring before or during subjective awareness of the action. Haggard and Magno suggest that awareness of action arises somewhere in the premotor cortices, or in the connections they make with the primary motor cortex. However, a potential weakness in this argument is that action awareness was affected as much by TMS applied to the primary motor cortex as it was by premotor cortical TMS. Further experiments with more precisely timed and focused TMS will no doubt be revealing in this regard, and will further the quest to identify the neural correlates of awareness.