Skip to main content
Log in

Narrators and comparators: the architecture of agentive self-awareness

  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper contrasts two approaches to agentive self-awareness: a high-level, narrative-based account, and a low-level comparator-based account. We argue that an agent’s narrative self-conception has a role to play in explaining their agentive judgments, but that agentive experiences are explained by low-level comparator mechanisms that are grounded in the very machinery responsible for action-production.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Aarts H., Custers R., Wegner D.M. (2005). On the inference of personal authorship: Enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness and Cognition 14, 439–458

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Archibald S.J., Mateer C.A., Kerns K.A. (2001). Utilization behavior: Clinical manifestations and neurological mechanisms. Neuropsychology Review 11(3): 117–130

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bayne, T. (2007). The phenomenology of agency. Philosophy Compass.

  • Blakemore S.-J., Frith C.D., (2003). Self-awareness and action. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 13, 219–224

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blakemore S.-J. Wolpert D.M., Frith C.D. (1998). Central cancellation of self-produced tickle sensations. Nature Neuroscience 1, 635–640

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blakemore S.-J. Wolpert D.M., Frith C.D. (1999). Spatiotemporal prediction modulates the perception of self-produced stimuli. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11, 551–559

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blakemore S.-J., Wolpert D.M., Frith C.D. (2000). Why can’t you tickle yourself?. NeuroReport 11, 11–16

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blakemore S.-J., Wolpert D.M., Frith C.D. (2002). Abnormalities in the awareness of action. Trends in Cognitive Science 6(6): 237–242

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bruner J.S., Goodman C.C. (1947). Value and need as organizing factors in perception. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 42, 33–44

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P. (2007). The illusion of conscious will. Synthese.10.1007/s11229-007-9204-7.

  • Claxton G. (1975). Why can’t we tickle ourselves?. Perceptual and Motor Skills 41, 335–338

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins D.A., Cameron T., Gillard D.M., Prochazka A. (1998). Muscular sense is attenuated when humans move. Journal of physiology 508, 635–643

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Della Sala S., Marchetti C., Spinnler H. (1991). Right-sided anarchic (alien) hand: A longitudinal study. Neuropsychologia 29(11): 1113–1127

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dennett D. (1992). The self as a center of narrative gravity. In: Kessel F., Cole P., Johnson D. (eds) Self and consciousness: Multiple perspectives. Hillsdale NJ, Erlbaum

    Google Scholar 

  • Desmurget M., Grafton S. (2000). Forward modeling allows feedback control for fast reaching movements. Trends in Cognitive Science 4, 423

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Estlinger P.J., Warner G.C., Grattan L.M., Easton J.D. (1991). Frontal lobe utilization behavior associated with paramedian thalamic infarction. Neurology 41, 450–452

    Google Scholar 

  • Feinberg T.E., Roane D.M., Ali J. (2000). Illusory limb movements in anosognosia for hemiplegia. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 68(4): 511–513

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Feinberg T.E., Roane D.M., Cohen J. (1998). Partial status epilepticus associated with asomotangosia and alien hand-like behaviours. Archives of Neurology 55, 1574–1577

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fried I., Katz A., McCarthy G., Sass K.J., Williamson P., Spencer S.S., Spencer D.D. (1991). Functional organisation of human supplementary motor cortex studied by electrical stimulation. Journal of Neuroscience 11, 3656–3666

    Google Scholar 

  • Frith C.D. (2005). The self in action: Lessons from delusions of control. Consciousness and Cognition 14(4): 752–770

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frith C.D., Blakemore S.-J., Wolpert D.M. (2000a). Abnormalities in the awareness and control of action. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 355, 1771–1788

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frith C.D., Blakemore S.-J., Wolpert D.M. (2000b). Explaining the symptoms of schizophrenia: Abnormalities in the awareness of action. Brain Research Reviews 31, 357–363

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher S. (2000a). Philosophical conceptions of the self: Implications for cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Science 4(1): 14–21

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher S. (2000b). Self-reference and schizophrenia: A cognitive model of immunity to error through misidentification. In: Zahavi D. (eds) Exploring the self: Philosophical and psychopathological perspectives on self-experience. Amsterdam, John Benjamins, pp. 203–239

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher S. (2007). The natural philosophy of agency. Philosophy Compass 2(2): 347–357

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gazzaniga M.S., LeDoux J.E. (1978). The integrated mind. New York, Plenum Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg G., Bloom K.K. (1990). The alien hand sign. Localization, lateralization and recovery. American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation 69, 228–238

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gopnik A. (1993). How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16(1–15): 90–101

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haggard P., Clark S. (2003). Intentional action: conscious experience and neural prediction. Consciousness and Cognition 12, 695–707

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haggard P., Eimer M. (1999). On the relation between brain potentials and the awareness of voluntary movements. Experimental Brain Research 126, 128–133

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haggard P., Magno E. (1999). Localizing awareness of action with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Experimental Brain Research 127, 102–107

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haggard P., Clark S., Kalogeras J. (2002). Voluntary action and conscious awareness. Nature Neuroscience 5(4): 382–385

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Horgan T., Tienson J., Graham G. (2003). The phenomenology of first-person agency. In: Walter S., Heckmann H.D. (eds) Physicalism and mental causation: The metaphysics of mind and action. Exeter, Imprint Academic, pp 323–340

    Google Scholar 

  • Johansson P., Hall L., Sikström S., Olsson A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science 310, 116–119

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kihlstrom J.F. (2007). Consciousness in hypnosis. In: Zelazo P.D., Moscovitch M., Thompson E. (eds) Cambridge handbook of consciousness. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 445–479

    Google Scholar 

  • Lhermitte F. (1983). Utilization behavior and its relation to lesions of the frontal lobes. Brain 106, 237–255

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lhermitte F. (1986). Human autonomy and the frontal lobes. Part II. Patient behaviour in complex and social situations: the “environmental dependency syndrome”. Annals of Neurology 19, 335–343

    Google Scholar 

  • Libet B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8, 529–566

    Google Scholar 

  • Libet B., Gleason C.A., Wright E.W., Pearl D.K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activities (readiness potential): the unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain 106, 623–642

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marcel A. (2003). The sense of agency: Awareness and ownership of action. In: Roessler J., Eilan N. (eds) Agency and self-awareness. Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 48–93

    Google Scholar 

  • Marchetti C., Della Salla S. (1998). Disentangling the alien and anarchic hand. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 3(3): 191–207

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Metcalfe J., Greene M.J. (2007). The metacognition of agency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136(2): 184–199

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pacherie E. (2001). Agency lost and found. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 8(2–3): 173–176

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pacherie E. (2007). The sense of control and the sense of agency. Psyche 13, 1. http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/symposia/siegel/Pacherie.pdf

  • Pacherie E., Green M., Bayne T. (2006). Phenomenology and delusions: Who put the ‘alien’ in alien control?. Consciousness and Cognition 15, 566–577

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Phillips W., Baron-Cohen S., Rutter M. (1998). Understanding intention in normal development and in autism. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 16, 337–348

    Google Scholar 

  • Roser M., Gazzaniga M.S. (2004). Automatic brains—interpretive minds. Current Directions in Psychological Science 13(2): 56–59

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roser M.E., Gazzaniga M.S. (2006). The interpreter in human psychology. In: Preuss T.M., Kaas J.H. (eds) The evolution of primate nervous systems. Oxford, Elsevier

    Google Scholar 

  • Sass L. (1992). Madness and modernism: Insanity in the light of modern art, literature, and thought. New York, Basic Books

    Google Scholar 

  • Sato A., Yasuda A. (2005). Illusion of sense of self-agency: Discrepancy between the predicted and actual sensory consequences of actions modulates the sense of self-agency, but not the sense of ownership. Cognition 94, 241–255

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sirigu A., Daprati E., Ciancia S., Giraux P., Nighoghossian N., Posada A., Haggard P. (2004). Altered awareness of voluntary action after damage to the parietal cortex. Nature Neuroscience 7(1): 80–84

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sirigu A., Duhamel J.-R., Cohen L., Pillon B., Dubois B., Agid Y. (1996). The mental representation of hand movements after parietal cortex damage. Science 273(5281): 1564–1568

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spence S.A. (2001). Alien control: From phenomenology to cognitive neurobiology. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8(2/3): 163–172

    Google Scholar 

  • Stephens G.L., Graham G. (2000). When self-consciousness breaks: Alien voices and inserted thoughts. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Synofzik, M., Vosgerau, G., & Newen, A. (in press). Beyond the comperator model: A multifactorial two-step account of agency. Consciousness and Cognition.

  • Wegner D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Wegner D.M., Sparrow B., Winerman L. (2004). Vicarious agency: Experiencing control over the movements of others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86(6): 838–848

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wegner D.M., Wheatley T.P. (1999). Apparent mental causation: Sources of the experience of will. American Psychologist 54, 480–492

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tim Bayne.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Bayne, T., Pacherie, E. Narrators and comparators: the architecture of agentive self-awareness. Synthese 159, 475–491 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9239-9

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9239-9

Keywords

Navigation