, 2011) Farrer et al. (2008) found that angular gyrus activation increased when participants became aware of action–effect discrepancy, even when they were not required to judge agency per se. According to the simplest model, explicit judgements of agency would depend on a computation performed by the angular gyrus to match actions with effects, but it remains unclear whether this matching process is completely automatic,

or requires explicit judgement of some kind, and whether the same matching process is also Dapagliflozin supplier the basis of the subjective feeling of agency. While explicit judgements of agency may be important in social contexts where any of several individuals might be responsible for an outcome, our everyday experiences of agency do not generally involve explicit judgement. We can, and frequently do, make instrumental actions where we have a definite background feeling or buzz of being in control. In such cases, we do have a phenomenal experience or sense of agency, even though we did not make any explicit judgement. We regularly experience a flow between the actions we make, and their external effects, for example when using

a computer keyboard, driving GSK126 a car or playing a guitar. Thus, we have an implicit feeling of agency, which is non-conceptual and sub-personal. Often, this implicit feeling of agency seems to run in the background of consciousness. Agency may only become truly salient when it is lost, for example when the keyboard on a computer jams, or the controls on TCL a car fail. In the normal flow of experience, the sense of agency seems just to be part of what it is like to control one’s action. The neural basis of this background feeling of agency is not well understood. There is a general consensus that learned spatiotemporal association between actions and effects contributes to the background

feeling of agency, in the same way as it contributes to explicit agency judgements. For example, the feeling of being in control over a car increases as we learn how to drive it. However, there is a general difficulty in measuring background phenomenologies of this kind. Several studies have used perceptual attenuation of sensory consequences of one’s own actions ( Blakemore et al., 1998; Chapman and Beauchamp, 2006) as an implicit measure of agency. In addition, several distortions of time perception can occur around the time of action. The pattern of these temporal distortions has lead to the suggestion that they could form a useful implicit marker of the sense of agency. For example, distortions of time perception occur for active, but not involuntary movements ( Haggard et al., 2002), and do not occur when the effects of action are explicitly attributed to another person ( Desantis et al., 2011).