The subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions
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The sense of agency (SoA), or sense of control, is the subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world.[1] It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movement(s) or thinking thoughts. In non-pathological experience, the SoA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership" (SoO), which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm (while you remained passive) you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership (SoO) for that movement. However, you would not have felt that you were the author of the movement; you would not have a sense of agency (SoA).[2]
Normally SoA and SoO are tightly integrated, such that while typing one has an enduring, embodied, and tacit sense that "my own fingers are doing the moving" (SoO) and that "the typing movements are controlled (or volitionally directed) by me" (SoA). In patients with certain forms of pathological experience (e.g., schizophrenia) the integration of SoA and SoO may become disrupted in some manner. In this case, movements may be executed or thoughts made manifest, for which the patient with schizophrenia has a sense of ownership, but not a sense of agency.[not verified in body]
Regarding SoA for both motor movements and thoughts, further distinctions may be found in both first-order (immediate, pre-reflective) experience[3] and higher-order (reflective or introspective) consciousness.[4][page needed] For example, while typing one has a sense of control and thus SoA for the ongoing action of typing; this is an example of SoA in first-order experience which is immediate and prior to any explicit intellectual reflection upon the typing actions themselves. In this case, the individual is not focusing on the typing movements per se but rather, intimately involved with the task at hand. If one is subsequently asked if they just performed the action of typing, they can -correctly- attribute agency to themselves. This is an example of a higher-order, reflective, conscious "attribution" of agency, which is a derivative notion stemming from the immediate, pre-reflective "sense" of agency.
^Jeannerod, M. (2003). The mechanism of self-recognition in human. Behavioural Brain Research, 142, 1-15.
^Gallagher, S. (2000). Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 14–21.
^Tsakiris M, Schütz-Bosbach S, Gallagher S (2007) On agency and body-ownership: phenomenological and neurocognitive reflections. Conscious Cogn 16:645–660
^Stephens, G. L., & Graham, G. (2000). When self-consciousness breaks: Alien voices and inserted thoughts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.[page needed]
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