Journal
BRAIN STRUCTURE & FUNCTION
Volume 220, Issue 6, Pages 3627-3639Publisher
SPRINGER HEIDELBERG
DOI: 10.1007/s00429-014-0878-6
Keywords
Action selection; Agency; Inferior parietal cortex; Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; Single-pulse TMS
Categories
Funding
- EU project VERE
- Region Ile-de-France (Paris) [ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC, ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL*]
- Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship
- ESRC Professorial Fellowship [RES-062-23-2183]
- ERC Advanced Grant HUMVOL
- AHRC [AH/L015145/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- ESRC [ES/J023140/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/L015145/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/J023140/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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Sense of agency refers to the feeling of controlling an external event through one's own action. On one influential view, sense of agency is inferred after an action, by retrospectively comparing actual effects of actions against their intended effects. However, it has been recently shown that earlier processes, linked to action selection, may also contribute to sense of agency, in advance of the action itself, and independently of action effects. The inferior parietal cortex (IPC) may underpin this prospective contribution to agency, by monitoring signals relating to fluency of action selection in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Here, we combined transcranial stimulation (TMS) with subliminal priming of action selection to investigate the causal role of these regions in the prospective coding of agency. In a first experiment, we showed that TMS over left IPC at the time of action selection disrupts perceived control over subsequent effects of action. In a second experiment, we exploited the temporal specificity of single-pulse TMS to pinpoint the exact timing of IPC contribution to sense of agency. We replicated the reduction in perceived control at the point of action selection, while observing no effect of TMS-induced disruption of IPC at the time of action outcomes.
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