On agency and body-ownership: Phenomenological and neurocognitive reflections

    Authors

    M. Tsakiris; S. Schutz-Bosbach;S. Gallagher

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    Conscious. Cogn.

    Keywords

    action; agency; body-ownership; phenomenology; self-awareness; sensory-motor; TRANSCRANIAL MAGNETIC STIMULATION; SELF-RECOGNITION; DEAFFERENTED; SUBJECT; VOLUNTARY ACTION; MOTOR CONTROL; AWARENESS; PERCEPTION; CORTEX; HAND; EXPERIENCE; Psychology, Experimental

    Abstract

    The recent distinction between sense of agency and sense of body-ownership has attracted considerable empirical and theoretical interest. The respective contributions of central motor signals and peripheral afferent signals to these two varieties of body experience remain unknown. In the present review, we consider the methodological problems encountered in the empirical study of agency and body-ownership, and we then present a series of experiments that study the interplay between motor and sensory information. In particular, we focus on how multisensory signals interact with body representations to generate the sense of body-ownership, and how the sense of agency modulates the sense of body-ownership. Finally, we consider the respective roles of efferent and afferent signals for the experience of one's own body and actions, in relation to self-recognition and the recognition of other people's actions. We suggest that the coherent experience of the body depends on the integration of efferent information with afferent information in action contexts. Overall, whereas afferent signals provide the distinctive content of one's own body experience, efferent signals seem to structure the experience of one's own body in an integrative and coherent way. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

    Journal Title

    Consciousness and Cognition

    Volume

    16

    Issue/Number

    3

    Publication Date

    1-1-2007

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    645

    Last Page

    660

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000250708100008

    ISSN

    1053-8100

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