Précis of the illusion of conscious will

The experience of conscious will is the feeling that we are doing things. This feeling occurs for many things we do, conveying to us again and again the sense that we consciously cause our actions. But the feeling may not be a true reading of what is happening in our minds, brains, and bodies as our actions are produced. The feeling of conscious will can be fooled. This happens in clinical disorders such as alien hand syndrome, dissociative identity disorder, and schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. And in people without disorders, phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic writing, Ouija board spelling, water dowsing, facilitated communication, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and trance channeling also illustrate anomalies of will--cases when actions occur without will or will occurs without action. This book brings these cases together with research evidence from laboratories in psychology to explore a theory of apparent mental causation. According to this theory, when a thought appears in consciousness just prior to an action, is consistent with the action, and appears exclusive of salient alternative causes of the action, we experience conscious will and ascribe authorship to ourselves for the action. Experiences of conscious will thus arise from processes whereby the mind interprets itself--not from processes whereby mind creates action. Conscious will, in this view, is an indication that we think we have caused an action, not a revelation of the causal sequence by which the action was produced.     

Limitations of distal effect anticipation when using tools

Modern technologies progressively create workplaces in which the execution of movements and the observation of their consequences are spatially separated. Challenging workplaces in which users act via technical equipment in a distant space include aviation, applied medical engineering and virtual reality. When using a tool, proprioceptive/tactile feedback from the moving hand (proximal action effect) and visual feedback from the moving effect point of the tool, such as the moving cursor on a display (the distal action effect) often do not correspond or are even in conflict. If proximal and distal feedback were equally important for controlling actions with tools, this discrepancy would be a constant source of interference. The human information processing system solves this problem by favoring the intended distal action effects while attenuating or ignoring proximal action effects. The study presents an overview of experiments aiming at the underlying motor and cognitive processes and the limitations of visual predominance in tool actions. The main findings are, that when transformations are in effect the awareness of one's own actions is quite low. This seems to be advantageous when using tools, as it allows for wide range of flexible sensorimotor adaptations and – may be more important – it evokes the feeling of being in control. Thus, the attenuation of perceiving one's own proximal action effects is an important precondition for using tools successfully. However, the ability to integrate discordant perception-action feedback has limits, especially, but not only, with complex transformations. When feature overlap between vision and proprioception is low, and when the existence of a transformation is obvious proximal action effects come to the fore and dominate action control in tool actions. In conclusion action–effect control plays an important role in understanding the constraints of the acquisition and application of tool transformations.     

Helping Children Enter Into Another's Experiences: The Look and Feel of It

The role of focusing 4-year-olds' attention on “feeling” or “looking” was examined in three experiments by testing predictions about children's memory for their interactions with an adult partner as they engaged in a collaborative task. Children made collages with an adult partner, and they were later asked to remember who placed the pieces on the collage. Children were more likely to claim they placed pieces actually placed by their partner (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), unless directed to think about how their partner looked when placing the partner's pieces (Experiments 1 and 3). False claims were observed after children were directed to think about how it would “feel” to perform the actions, whether motoric instructions were focused on the self (Experiment 2, N = 48) or partner (Experiment 1, N = 40, and Experiment 3, N = 24). Furthermore, false claims (referred to as I did it errors) were positively associated with accurate collage memory (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that adopting a perspective during encoding that involves “feeling” movements—whether focused on the self or partner—plays an important role in children's memory for collaboration (in this context, memory for contributions made by children or their adult partners to the completion of a collage). A focus on “feeling” may be a way to “enter into” the experiences of another, promoting anticipation and recoding, which may lead to better learning in both collaborative and non-collaborative contexts.     

The Self as a Moral Agent: Preschoolers Behave Morally but Believe in the Freedom to Do Otherwise

Recent work suggests a strong connection between intuitions regarding our own free will and our moral behavior. We investigate the origins of this link by asking whether preschool-aged children construe their own moral actions as freely chosen. We gave children the option to make three moral/social choices (avoiding harm to another, following a rule, and following peer behavior) and then asked them to retrospect as to whether they were free to have done otherwise. When given the choice to act (either morally or immorally), children avoided harm and abided by rules, but they endorsed their freedom to have done otherwise. When choice was restricted by adult instruction, children did not endorse their free choice and indicated feeling constrained by moral obligation in their explanatory responses. These results suggest that children believe that their moral actions afford free will, but this belief is dependent on their experience of choice.     

Experience of agency and sense of responsibility

The experience of agency refers to the feeling that we control our own actions, and through them the outside world. In many contexts, sense of agency has strong implications for moral responsibility. For example, a sense of agency may allow people to choose between right and wrong actions, either immediately, or on subsequent occasions through learning about the moral consequences of their actions. In this study we investigate the relation between the experience of operant action, and responsibility for action outcomes using the intentional binding effect (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002) as an implicit, quantitative measure related to sense of agency. We studied the time at which people perceived simple manual actions and their effects, when these actions were embedded in scenarios where their actions had unpredictable consequences that could be either moral or merely economic. We found an enhanced binding of effects back towards the actions that caused them, implying an enhanced sense of agency, in moral compared to non-moral contexts. We also found stronger binding for effects with severely negative, compared to moderately negative, values. A tight temporal association between action and effect may be a low-level phenomenal marker of the sense of responsibility.     

Young children attribute normativity to novel actions without pedagogy or normative language

Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with normative language (e.g. 'this is the way it goes'), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information, and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children to novel actions with no normative language, and we systematically varied pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues in an attempt to identify which of them, if either, would lead children to normative interpretations. We found that young 3-year-old children inferred normativity without any normative language and without any pedagogical cues. The only cue they used was adult social-pragmatic marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if inventing it on the spot). These results suggest that - in the absence of explicit normative language - young children interpret adult actions as normatively governed based mainly on the intentionality (perhaps signaling conventionality) with which they are performed.     

幼儿在联合行动中共同表征能力的发展

为探究幼儿联合行动共同表征能力的发展,实验1通过比较186名3~5岁幼儿在相同任务和不同任务的表现,发现4岁和5岁幼儿在不同任务中的表现比相同任务差;实验2进一步验证幼儿在不同任务中较差的表现源于对自我和同伴的共同表征。结论：3岁幼儿无法在联合任务中同时表征自我和同伴,没有表现出明显的共同表征能力,4岁以上幼儿开始具备稳定的共同表征能力,能够在联合任务中同时表征自己和同伴,由此对自己的行为表现造成干扰。     

The Experience of Agency: Feelings, Judgments, and Responsibility

ABSTRACT— The experience of agency refers to the experience of being in control both of one's own actions and, through them, of events in the external world. Recent experimental studies have investigated how people recognise a particular event as being caused by their own action or by that of another person. These studies suggest that people match sensory inputs to a prediction based on the action they are performing. Other studies have contrasted voluntary actions to physically similar but passive body movements. These studies suggest that voluntary action triggers wide-ranging changes in the spatial and temporal experience not only of one's own body but also of external events. Prediction and monitoring of the consequences of one's own motor commands produces characteristic experiences that form our normal, everyday feeling of being in control of our life. We conclude by discussing the implications of recent psychological work for our notions of responsibility for action.     

Subliminal action priming modulates the perceived intensity of sensory action consequences

The sense of control over the consequences of one’s actions depends on predictions about these consequences. According to an influential computational model, consistency between predicted and observed action consequences attenuates perceived stimulus intensity, which might provide a marker of agentic control. An important assumption of this model is that these predictions are generated within the motor system. However, previous studies of sensory attenuation have typically confounded motor-specific perceptual modulation with perceptual effects of stimulus predictability that are not specific to motor action. As a result, these studies cannot unambiguously attribute sensory attenuation to a motor locus. We present a psychophysical experiment on auditory attenuation that avoids this pitfall. Subliminal masked priming of motor actions with compatible prime–target pairs has previously been shown to modulate both reaction times and the explicit feeling of control over action consequences. Here, we demonstrate reduced perceived loudness of tones caused by compatibly primed actions. Importantly, this modulation results from a manipulation of motor processing and is not confounded by stimulus predictability. We discuss our results with respect to theoretical models of the mechanisms underlying sensory attenuation and subliminal motor priming.     

Intact and impaired mechanisms of action understanding in autism

Typically developing children understand and predict others' behavior by extracting and processing relevant information such as the logic of their actions within the situational constraints and the intentions conveyed by their gaze direction and emotional expressions. Children with autism have difficulties understanding and predicting others' actions. With the use of eye tracking and behavioral measures, we investigated action understanding mechanisms used by 18 children with autism and a well-matched group of 18 typically developing children. Results showed that children with autism (a) consider situational constraints in order to understand the logic of an agent's action and (b) show typical usage of the agent's emotional expressions to infer his or her intentions. We found (c) subtle atypicalities in the way children with autism respond to an agent's direct gaze and (d) marked impairments in their ability to attend to and interpret referential cues such as a head turn for understanding an agent's intentions.     

动作自主性与结果性质对不同预测性条件下施动感的影响

采用时间估计法考察动作自主性水平、动作结果性质(利己、利他、中性)以及结果是否可预测对施动感的影响。结果发现, 高自主性的自由选择条件比低自主性的服从条件增强了个体的施动感, 且不受动作结果性质与结果是否可预测的影响; 在低自主性的服从条件下, 当结果可预测时利己结果比利他结果的施动感更强, 而在结果不可预测时利己和利他结果的施动感没有区别, 但均弱于中性结果。这揭示出动作的主观意愿在施动感产生过程中的重要作用, 同时在自主性较低的服从条件下, 对利己或利他道德属性的动作结果能否被预测, 对个体的施动感产生了不同的影响。研究结果说明具有利己或利他道德属性的动作对施动感会产生自上而下的调节作用, 且这种调节作用在低自主条件下较为突显。     

A problem for Wegner and colleagues’ model of the sense of agency

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.     

Books Received from August 1, 2009 to July 31, 2010

This study aimed to explore the recognition of emotional and non-emotional biological movements in children with severe and profound deafness. Twenty-four deaf children, together with 24 control children matched on mental age and 24 control children matched on chronological age, were asked to identify a person's actions, subjective states, emotions, and objects conveyed by moving point-light displays. Results showed that when observing point-light displays, deaf children showed impairments across all conditions (emotions, actions, and moving objects) compared with their chronological age-matched controls but showed no differences across subjective states. The results are supportive that deaf children present developmental delays in their biological motion apart from the ones relative to their own mental state, and this may be interpreted in relation to the expertise they have acquired in decoding action toward themselves. The findings are discussed in relation to deaf children viewing motion stimuli very differently to hearing children.     

Memory for actions in autism spectrum disorder

This study explored how memory for actions in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children might benefit from self-performance and experimenter demonstration, and whether these groups possess metamemory knowledge of their performance levels in this task. Children with autism were less accurate on the action memory task when they carried out each action themselves during encoding, or when no actions were implemented during this phase, but this difference was abolished when the experimenter demonstrated each action during encoding. Despite clear difficulties in the self-performed condition relative to typical children, the group with ASD also showed a beneficial effect of performing the actions themselves during instruction. Finally, children with autism were as accurate as typical children in judging the accuracy of their own memory performance, indicating an absence of metamemory difficulties for this task.     

The action congruency effect on the feelings of agency

Previous studies suggest that the sense of agency (SoA), the feeling of control about one’s own actions and ensuing effects is also generated during action selection processes. We investigate whether the conflict at the action selection stage induced by a supraliminal stimulus, modulates an implicit measure of SoA, namely intentional binding. Furthermore, we were interested to investigate the influence of different types of stimulus-response compatibility on SoA. To this aim we compared the influence of an automatic imitation task and a stroop-like task on intentional binding. In both tasks participants performed congruent and incongruent fingers movements (key release) in response to an external stimulus. Their movements caused an effect and participants estimated the time between their action and the ensuing effect. We found a reduced intentional binding effect in incongruent compared to congruent conditions in both tasks. The results are discussed within the theoretical framework of the fluency of action.     

Action preferences and the anticipation of action outcomes

Skilled performers of time-constrained motor actions acquire information about the action preferences of their opponents in an effort to better anticipate the outcome of that opponent's actions. However, there is reason to doubt that knowledge of an opponent's action preferences would unequivocally influence anticipatory responses in a positive way. It is possible that overt information about an opponent's actions could distract skilled performers from using the advance kinematic information they would usually rely on to anticipate actions, particularly when the opponent performs an ‘unexpected’ action that is not in accordance with his or her previous behaviour. The aim of this study was to examine how the ability to anticipate the outcome of an opponent's actions can be influenced by exposure to the action preferences of that opponent. Two groups of skilled handball goalkeepers anticipated the direction of penalty throws performed by opponents before and after a training intervention that provided situational probability information in the form of action preferences (AP). During the training phase participants in an AP-training group anticipated the action outcomes of two throwers who had a strong preference to throw in one particular direction, whilst participants in a NP-training group viewed players who threw equally to all directions. Exposure to opponents who did have an action preference during the training phase resulted in improved anticipatory performance if the opponent continued to bias their throws towards their preferred direction, but decreased performance if the opponent did not. These findings highlight that skilled observers use information about action preferences to enhance their anticipatory ability, but that doing so can be disadvantageous when the outcomes are no longer consistent with their generated expectations.     

Talking about Personality: Evidence for Attributions to Self and Others in Early Childhood

ABSTRACT

The early use of person perception terms was examined via an analysis of the spontaneous speech of four young children in conversation with their parents at home. All four children were producing such terms early in their third year. Like their parents, children used the terms in two distinguishable ways: to attribute a trait to a person or to characterize a person’s ongoing action. Most of these terms were evaluative, whether positive or negative. Parents often made direct comments to their children about both their traits and ongoing actions; children made similar comments about themselves. Parents also used person perception terms to make comments about others who were not party to the conversation; children did likewise. A considerable proportion of the trait terms that children produced served as interpretive comments on someone’s actions or preferences. Our findings suggest that from an early age, children are trait theorists. Not only do they describe ongoing actions using trait vocabulary, they interpret those ongoing actions by attributing traits.     

An inferential approach to the knew-it-all-along phenomenon

Two studies tested the hypothesis that the knew-it-all-along effect may be the result of an inferential process. Specifically, that individuals use their feelings and experiences (e.g., "This question seems so familiar to me, surely I would have known the answer!") to infer their judgement. Drawing on subjective feelings such as certainty or perceptual fluency, individuals can use a provided actual value as an informational cue and draw inferences from it. Thus, the occurrence of the knew-it-all-along effect is expected to depend on the experienced feeling of confidence with a question. This feeling may indicate to an individual that he or she did know the answer; a total lack of such a feeling may suggest that he or she never would have known the answer. In the reported studies we both measured feelings of confidence (Study 1) and induced them by manipulating perceptual fluency (Study 2) to show that the knew-it-all-along effect proves to be a phenomenon of inferences based on these experienced feelings. Participants experiencing high confidence or high perceptual fluency more strongly assimilated their judgements to the provided values, than did participants experiencing low confidence or low perceptual fluency.     

An inferential approach to the knew-it-all-along phenomenon

Two studies tested the hypothesis that the knew-it-all-along effect may be the result of an inferential process. Specifically, that individuals use their feelings and experiences (e.g., "This question seems so familiar to me, surely I would have known the answer!") to infer their judgement. Drawing on subjective feelings such as certainty or perceptual fluency, individuals can use a provided actual value as an informational cue and draw inferences from it. Thus, the occurrence of the knew-it-all-along effect is expected to depend on the experienced feeling of confidence with a question. This feeling may indicate to an individual that he or she did know the answer; a total lack of such a feeling may suggest that he or she never would have known the answer. In the reported studies we both measured feelings of confidence (Study 1) and induced them by manipulating perceptual fluency (Study 2) to show that the knew-it-all-along effect proves to be a phenomenon of inferences based on these experienced feelings. Participants experiencing high confidence or high perceptual fluency more strongly assimilated their judgements to the provided values, than did participants experiencing low confidence or low perceptual fluency.     

婴儿如何认识他心：“似我”假说述评

Meltzoff的“似我”假说认为,婴儿借助“我他对等”认识解读他人行为和心理状态,通过他人间的互动信息推断和调整自身行为。“似我”认识以动作表征为基础,借助第一人称体验建立双向映射,对“似我”之人进行因果推理,由此构成发展路径引导婴儿认识他心。注视追随与模仿两种初级社会学习机制进一步丰富了婴儿对社交关系的理解,使人类学习的渠道突破了自我体验的局限而变得更加多元。