Abstract
The sense of agency, that is the sense that one is the agent of one’s bodily actions, is one component of our self-consciousness. Recently, Wegner and colleagues have developed a model of the causal history of this sense. Their model takes it that the sense of agency is elicited for an action when one infers that one or other of one’s mental states caused that action. In their terms, the sense of agency is elicited by the inference to apparent mental state causation. Here, I argue that this model is inconsistent with data from developmental psychology that suggests children can identify the agent behind an action without being capable of understanding the relationship between their intentions and actions. Furthermore, I argue that this model is inconsistent with the preserved sense of agency in autism. In general, the problem is that there are cases where subjects can experience themselves as the agent behind their actions despite lacking the resources to make the inference to apparent mental state causation.
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Notes
See e.g. (Aziz-Zadeh et al. 2006) for the plausibility of such a view.
One potential explanation for this result is that subjects attempted to stop on the named item during the forced stop conditions. If this is the case, then the higher scores would reflect the attempt to do this. Wegner and Wheatley investigated this possibility, but concluded that, while subjects reported performing visual searches for the named items, they did not seem to be making any attempt to stop on them during the forced stop trials as they made no attempt to stop on them during the free stop trials (Wegner and Wheatley 1999, p. 489).
The notion of consistency may be problematic here. Unlike the helping hands study, these subjects were not receiving instructions to act in a particular way. Rather, they heard only the name of the object being stopped on. Such an experience is neither consistent nor inconsistent with actually stopping on that object (Bayne 2006; thanks to an anonymous reviewer for making this point.). I take it that all Wegner and Wheatley are suggesting is that the thought represents some feature of the outcome of the action. Whether or not this is a strong enough notion of consistency is a matter for further debate.
At this point, the advocate of Wegner’s model may be tempted to propose that studies like those from Montgomery and Lightner simply probe a different phenomenon to what the inference to mental causation is supposed to explain. It may be the case that they measure judgements of agency and not the sense of agency. Might subjects in this study be forming judgements that they are agents of the action without having a feeling of doing so? This seems unlikely. It is not even clear what it would mean to form a judgement of one’s own agency without having any sense of agency. Although judgements of one’s own agency are not identical to the sense of one’s own agency, it seems that they are usually the sense of agency plus. That is, they are the sense of agency plus some conceptual level judgement. The advocate of this objection would to show that judgements of one’s own agency can occur without having a sense of agency and that this is what is happening in these cases. The same applies the cases discussed below where the sense of agency is operationalised via some judgement. It also applies to studies such as “helping hands” and “I-spy” which operationalise the sense of agency via judgements of agency and were used to support Wegner and colleagues model. However, this does not apply to cases where the sense of agency is operationalised via something other than judgements of agency, in particular, those where the sense of agency is measured via self-monitoring performance in e.g. the squares task.
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Acknowledgements
This work was undertaken toward a Ph.D. at Adelaide University and Macquarie University. I thank John Sutton, Philip Gerrans, Max Coltheart and Gerard O’Brien for their work in supervising my thesis. My thanks go to two anonymous reviewers for their detailed critiques. Thanks also go to the audiences at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness for their stimulating discussions of previous versions of this paper. Finally my thanks go to Elizabeth Schier and Kristina Musholt for their extensive comments on early drafts.
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Carruthers, G. A problem for Wegner and colleagues’ model of the sense of agency. Phenom Cogn Sci 9, 341–357 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9150-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9150-6