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The feeling of agency hypothesis: a critique

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Abstract

A dominant view in contemporary cognitive neuroscience is that low-level, comparator-based mechanisms of motor control produce a distinctive experience often called the feeling of agency (the FoA-hypothesis). An opposing view is that comparator-based motor control is largely non-conscious and not associated with any particular type of distinctive phenomenology (the simple hypothesis). In this paper, I critically evaluate the nature of the empirical evidence researchers commonly take to support FoA-hypothesis. The aim of this paper is not only to scrutinize the FoA-hypothesis and data supposed to support it; it is equally to argue that experimentalists supporting the FoA-hypothesis fail to establish that the experimental outcomes are more probable given the FoA-hypothesis than given the simpler hypothesis.

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Notes

  1. For similar statements, see (Chambon and Haggard (2013), p. 359), and (Kühn et al. (2013), p. 1936): “We can, and frequently do, make instrumental actions where we have a definite background feeling or buzz of being in control.”

  2. One referee wrote that the argument presented in this paper generalizes to other models of the phenomenal sense of agency, such as optimal cue integration (Synofzik et al. 2008) and some versions of Wegner’s inferential model (e.g. Wegner 2004). Another referee insisted, however, that my arguments only have a limited scope and leave other models untouched. I will leave these issues of scope up to the reader.

  3. See also (Haggard and Tsakiris (2009), p. 243), and (Wenke et al. (2010), p. 35).

  4. It should be noted that the “classical” comparator model of motor control is not unchallenged. See, for example, Friston (2011).

  5. Similar functional stories could be told with respect to the other comparator-based accounts of the feeling of agency.

  6. By “intention” I mean a personal-level state, which is often the outcome of the agent’s practical decision-making. It is a state governed by particular normative and rational constraints. As such, this state is very different from the kind of functional state sometimes referred to by the term “motor intention”. For discussion of this point, see Butterfill and Sinigaglia (2014).

  7. See, e.g., (Tsakiris and Haggard (2005), p. 387).

  8. See also Bayne and Pacherie (2007): “agentive judgments are typically grounded in and justified by agentive experiences. In the normal case, we judge that we are the agent of a particular movement on the grounds that we enjoy an agentive experience with respect to it; here, our agentive judgments are simply endorsements of our agentive experiences” (p. 477).

  9. How does my use of the term “feeling of agency” relate to the more frequent use of the term “sense of agency” that we see in the literature? It is hard to give a clear answer because of the often ambiguous and loose terminology. Often the two terms appear to be simply synonymous but at other times not. According to one prominent way to use “sense of agency”, it refers to a more complex phenomenon involving both low-level phenomenal states and high-level cognitive evaluations and judgements [see Synofzik et al. (2008), Pacherie (2008), and Gallagher (2012), for comparable complex models]. In order to distinguish the target of my critique from this type of more global, complex model, I will stick to the term “feeling of agency”. On some versions of the complex model, something like the FoA-hypothesis is an element.

  10. As has been thoroughly documented by Jeannerod (1997, 2006).

  11. I thank a reviewer for providing me with this sentence.

  12. See Farrer et al. (2003): “[the feeling of agency] is the feeling that leads us to attribute an action to ourselves rather than to another person (p. 324)”.

  13. \(p\)(data|FoA-hypothesis) \(=\) \(p\)(data|simpler hypothesis).

  14. The experimental evidence for this claim is Spence et al. (1997).

  15. Frith & Johnstone (Frith and Johnstone (2003), pp. 137–138) describe these odd experiences as “unexpected sensations” “that indicate that we are not fully in control of our movements” and that “might feel like unpredictable passive movements”.

  16. This seems to be the explanation offered by Frith and Done (1988), and Stirling et al. (1998). Notice that Daprati et al. did not find that patients with delusions of alien control were worse at action-recognition that patients experiencing hallucinations.

  17. It is an open question whether introspective reports are best understood as a judgement about one’s experience or as an expression of one’s experience (see, e.g., Bar-On 2004). This dispute has no implications for the present argument.

  18. As Wegner writes: “Although the proper experiments have not yet been done to test this, it seems likely that people could discriminate the feeling of doing from other feelings, knowing by the sheer quality of the experience just what has happened” (Wegner 2004, p. 658).

  19. \(p\)(data|FoA-hypothesis) \(>p\)(data|simpler hypothesis).

  20. For example, after an interval, the inability to report a stimulus cannot be taken as proof of absence of experience because the subject could simply have forgotten. See, for instance, discussions about overflow of conscious experience in the Sperling-paradigm (Sperling 1960; Block 2011; Phillips 2011).

  21. One reviewer suggested that better cases to discuss would be Wegner’s cases of automatisms (Wegner 2002, Chap. 1 & 4). These are cases where an apparent voluntary movement is performed without any explicit intention or even with explicit disavowal of intention. These are, however, also cases performed without any feeling of agency, if any such exist. Since intentions and feeling of agency disappear together in these cases, they cannot serve as evidence for an intention-free feeling of agency. Furthermore, most of the descriptions are anecdotal. The subjective reports vastly underdetermine our choice of phenomenological description.

  22. The neurocognitive approach to psychopathology is of course not universally accepted. For another influential but fundamentally conflicting approach, see Bovet and Parnas (1993), Parnas (1999), and Parnas et al. (2005).

  23. A similar view is endorsed by (Coltheart et al. (2010), p. 264) (in an explanation of Capgras delusion): “the first delusion-relevant event of which the patient is aware is the belief”.

  24. Similar view is expressed by (Coltheart (2005), p. 155) : “Only when a prediction fails does consciousness get involved; the unconscious system makes some kind of report to consciousness to instigate some intelligent conscious problem-solving behavior that will discover what’s wrong.”

  25. The argument works by exclusion. Maybe there are contrast cases I have not considered that are genuinely informative. Some authors also use the case of Anarchic Hand Syndrome (e.g. Bayne 2011). This type of case can easily be dismissed. Since both intention and (alleged) feeling of agency are missing in AHS, they are not informative with respect to an intention-free feeling of agency. See, for example, (Cheyne et al. (2009), p. 481): “[...] the intentions do not seem to be their concurrent intentions and hence agency is transferred from self to hand. Such patients have experienced not merely a loss, but an active alienation, of agency for the anarchic actions”. See also, Kritikos et al. (2005), and Della Sala (2005).

  26. See (Pacherie (2001), p. 174): “our ordinary experience of agency may simply be a rather diffuse sense of a coherent ongoing flow of anticipations and sensory feedback.” Also (Hohwy and Frith (2004), p. 185).

  27. See Grünbaum (2011), for an argument in support of the idea that perception often has a distinctive, epistemic function in agents’ knowledge of their own actions.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Adrian Alsmith, Glenn Carruthers, Mark Schram Christensen, Ophelia Deroy, Frederique de Vignemont, Mads Jensen, John Michael, Krisztina Orban, Barry Smith, Mikkel C. Vinding, Martin Voss, Hong Yu Wong, and a number of anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments to earlier versions of the manuscript. The material has been presented at workshops and conferences in Aarhus, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Granada, London, and Tübingen, and I have received many helpful comments and suggestions. Research for this paper was funded by a grant from the Danish Research Council, FKK, project “Phenomenal Consciousness and Cognitive Motor Control”.

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  1. Philosophy Section, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens vej 4, 2300 , Copenhagen S., Denmark

    Thor Grünbaum

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Grünbaum, T. The feeling of agency hypothesis: a critique. Synthese 192, 3313–3337 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0704-6

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