Full Description
Agency has two meanings in psychology and neuroscience. It can refer to one's capacity to affect the world and act in line with one's goals and desires--this is the objective aspect of agency. But agency can also refer to the subjective experience of controlling one's actions, or how it feels to achieve one's goals or affect the world. This subjective aspect is known as the sense of agency, and it is an important part of what makes us human.
Interest in the sense of agency has exploded since the early 2000s, largely because scientists have learned that it can be studied objectively through analyses of human judgment, behavior, and the brain. This book brings together some of the world's leading researchers to give structure to this nascent but rapidly growing field. The contributors address questions such as: What role does agency play in the sense of self? Is agency based on predicting outcomes of actions? And what are the links between agency and motivation?
Recent work on the sense of agency has been markedly interdisciplinary. The chapters collected here combine ideas and methods from fields as diverse as engineering, psychology, neurology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, making the book a valuable resource for any student or researcher interested in action, volition, and exploring how mind and brain are organized.
Contents
Introduction ; Part I. Volition ; 1. Time to Act: The Dynamics of Agentive Experiences ; Elisabeth Pacherie ; 2. Deconstructing Voluntary Action: Unconscious and Conscious Component Processes ; Lara C. Krisst, Carlos Montemayor, and Ezequiel Morsella ; 3. Action Control by If-then Plans: Explicating the Mechanisms of Strategic Automaticity ; Torsten Martiny-Huenger, Sarah E. Martiny, and Peter M. Gollwitzer ; 4. Neural Correlates of Intentions ; Roee Gilron, Shiri Simon, and Roy Mukamel ; 5. Explicit and Implicit Beliefs, Attitudes, and Intentions: The Role of Conscious and Unconscious Processes in Human Behavior ; Icek Ajzen and Nilanjana Dasgupta ; 6. The Neural Basis Underlying the Experience of Control in the Human Brain ; Lauren A. Leotti, Catherine Cho, and Mauricio R. Delgado ; 7. Goals and the Sense of Agency: The Case of Goal Conflict ; Tali Kleiman ; Part II. Determining Authorship ; 8. Inference Processes Underlying the Human Experience of Agency over Operant Actions ; Myrthel Dogge and Henk Aarts ; 9. Agency and Outcome Prediction ; Antje Gentsch and Simone Schutz-Bosbach ; 10. The Relations between Agency and Body-Ownership: Additive or Independent? ; Manos Tsakiris ; 11. Innate Experience of Self-Agency ; Philippe Rochat ; 12. Motivation from Control: A Response Selection Framework ; Noam Karsh and Baruch Eitam ; Part III. Beyond Authorship ; 13. Comparators and Weightings: Neurocognitive Accounts of Agency ; Matthis Synofzik ; 14. Action Control and the Sense of Agency ; Bernhard Hommel ; 15. Control and Truth Working Together: The Agentic Experience "Going in the Right Direction" ; E. Tory Higgins ; Part IV. Disturbances ; 16. Sense of Agency and Its Disruption: Clinical and Computational Perspectives ; Paul Fletcher and Aikaterini Fotopoulou ; 17. Action Generation, Intention, and Agency in Motor and Body Awareness Deficits ; Anna Berti, Francesca Garbarini, and Lorenzo Pia ; 18. Disorders of Volition from Neurological Disease: Altered Awareness of Action in Neurological Disorders ; James B. Rowe and Noham Wolpe ; Index
