A Bayesian psychophysics model of sense of agency

Roberto Legaspi () and Taro Toyoizumi ()
Additional contact information
Roberto Legaspi: RIKEN Center for Brain Science
Taro Toyoizumi: RIKEN Center for Brain Science

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Sense of agency (SoA) refers to the experience or belief that one’s own actions caused an external event. Here we present a model of SoA in the framework of optimal Bayesian cue integration with mutually involved principles, namely reliability of action and outcome sensory signals, their consistency with the causation of the outcome by the action, and the prior belief in causation. We used our Bayesian model to explain the intentional binding effect, which is regarded as a reliable indicator of SoA. Our model explains temporal binding in both self-intended and unintentional actions, suggesting that intentionality is not strictly necessary given high confidence in the action causing the outcome. Our Bayesian model also explains that if the sensory cues are reliable, SoA can emerge even for unintended actions. Our formal model therefore posits a precision-dependent causal agency.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12170-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-12170-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12170-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().