•We examined the influence of action-outcome delay on sense of agency and binding.•Delay impaired self-reported sense of agency, but not binding.•We also examined the influence of arousal.•Arousal ...enhanced binding but had no influence on the self-reported agency.•Self-reported agency and binding reflect different aspects of the sense of agency.
The sense of agency refers to the feeling of being able to initiate and control events through one’s actions. The “intentional binding” effect (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002), refers to a subjective compression of the temporal interval between actions and their effects. The present study examined the influence of action-outcome delays and arousal on both the subjective judgment of agency and the intentional binding effect. In the experiment, participants pressed a key to trigger a central square to jump after various delays. A red central square was used in the high-arousal condition. Results showed that a longer interval between actions and their effects was associated with a lower sense of agency but a stronger intentional binding effect. Furthermore, although arousal enhanced the intentional binding effect, it did not influence the judgment of agency.
Driving automation has been developing rapidly during the latest decade. However, all current technologies of driving automation still require human drivers' monitoring and intervention. This means ...that during driving automation, the control by human driver and by the driving automation system are blended. In this case, if the human driver loses the sense of agency over the vehicle, he/she may not be able to actively engage in driving, and may excessively rely on the driving automation system. This review focuses on the subjective feeling of agency of the human driver over the vehicle in such situations. We address the possible measures of agency in driving automation, and discuss the insights from literatures on the sense of agency in joint control, robotics, automation, and driving assistance. We suggest that maintaining the sense of agency for human driver is important for ethical and safety reasons. We further propose a number of avenues for further research, which may help to better design an optimized driving automation considering human sense of agency.
The sense of agency refers to the feeling that one is controlling events through one's own behavior. This study examined how task performance and the delay of events influence one's sense of agency ...during continuous action accompanied by a goal. The participants were instructed to direct a moving dot into a square as quickly as possible by pressing the left and right keys on a keyboard to control the direction in which the dot traveled. The interval between the key press and response of the dot (i.e., direction change) was manipulated to vary task difficulty. Moreover, in the assisted condition, the computer ignored participants' erroneous commands, resulting in improved task performance but a weaker association between the participants' commands and actual movements of the dot relative to the condition in which all of the participants' commands were executed (i.e., self-control condition). The results showed that participants' sense of agency increased with better performance in the assisted condition relative to the self-control condition, even though a large proportion of their commands were not executed. We concluded that, when the action-feedback association was uncertain, cognitive inference was more dominant relative to the process of comparing predicted and perceived information in the judgment of agency.
Self-related stimuli are important cues for people to recognize themselves in the external world and hold a special status in our perceptual system. Self-voice plays an important role in daily social ...communication and is also a frequent input for self-identification. Although many studies have been conducted on the acoustic features of self-voice, no research has ever examined the spatial aspect, although the spatial perception of voice is important for humans. This study proposes a novel perspective for studying self-voice. We investigated people's distance perception of their own voice when the voice was heard from an external position. Participants heard their own voice from one of four speakers located either 90 or 180 cm from their sitting position, either immediately after uttering a short vowel (i.e., active session) or hearing the replay of their own pronunciation (i.e., replay session). They were then asked to indicate which speaker they heard the voice from. Their voices were either pitch-shifted by ± 4 semitones (i.e., other-voice condition) or unaltered (i.e., self-voice condition). The results of spatial judgment showed that self-voice from the closer speakers was misattributed to that from the speakers further away at a significantly higher proportion than other-voice. This phenomenon was also observed when the participants remained silent and heard prerecorded voices. Additional structural equation modeling using participants' schizotypal scores showed that the effect of self-voice on distance perception was significantly associated with the score of delusional thoughts (Peters Delusion Inventory) and distorted body image (Perceptual Aberration Scale) in the active speaking session but not in the replay session. The findings of this study provide important insights for understanding how people process self-related stimuli when there is a small distortion and how this may be linked to the risk of psychosis.
The sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over one's own actions, and through them, the external events. This study examined the effect of modified visual feedback on the sense of agency ...over one's body movements using virtual reality in healthy individuals whose motor control was disturbed. Participants moved a virtual object using their right hand to trace a trajectory (Experiment 1) or a leading target (Experiment 2). Their motor control was disturbed by a delay in visual feedback (Experiment 1) or a 1-kg weight attached to their wrist (Experiment 2). In the offset conditions, the virtual object was presented at the median point between the desired position and the participants' actual hand position. In both experiments, participants reported improved sense of agency in the offset condition compared to the aligned condition where the visual feedback reflected their actual body movements, despite their motion being less precise in the offset condition. The results show that sense of agency can be enhanced by modifying feedback to motor tasks according to the goal of the task, even when visual feedback is discrepant from the actual body movements. The present study sheds light on the possibility of artificially enhancing body agency to improve voluntary motor control.
Adaptive motor learning refers to the ability to adjust to novel disturbances in the environment as a way of minimizing sensorimotor errors. It is known that such processes show large individual ...differences and are linked to multiple perceptual and cognitive processes. On the other hand, the sense of agency refers to the subjective feeling of control during voluntary motor control. Is the sense of agency just a by-product of the control outcome, or is it actually important for motor control and learning? To answer this question, this study takes an approach based on individual differences to investigate the relationship between the sense of agency and learnability in sensorimotor adaptation. Specifically, we use an adaptive motor learning task to measure individual differences in the efficiency of motor learning. Regarding the sense of agency, we measure the perceptual sensitivity of detecting an increase or a decrease in control when the actual level of control gradually increases or decreases, respectively. The results of structure equation modelling reveal a significant influence of perceptual sensitivity to increased control on motor learning efficiency. On the other hand, the link between perceptual sensitivity to decreased control and motor learning is nonsignificant. The results show that the sense of agency in detecting increased control is associated with the actual ability of sensorimotor adaptation: people who are more sensitive in detecting their control in the environment can also more quickly adjust their behaviors to novel disturbances to acquire better control, compared to people who have a less sensitive sense of agency. Finally, the results also reveal that the processes of increasing control and decreasing control may be partially independent.
The automation of inspection methods for concrete structures is a pressing issue worldwide. Weakly supervised approaches, i.e., approaches based on supervision in other forms than traditional class ...labels, offer a unique mix of automation and human involvement that is highly effective for critical tasks such as inspection work. Generating weak supervision is less tedious than generating training data for supervised learning approaches. However, since it is less informative, high amounts of weak supervision are often needed. In practice, it is often the case that only scarce amounts of weak supervision are available. In this article, we propose a novel approach for weakly supervised acoustic defect detection in concrete structures that augment human-provided weak supervision. Experiments in both laboratory and field conditions showed that the proposed method allows for considerable performance gains for low amounts of weak supervision.
•The objects for grasping are represented in AIP-F5 network.•The AIP-F5 network and the mirror neuron system represent one's own hand.•The mirror neurons shares self and other, and also represents ...them distinctively.•The parieto-premotor network contributes to sense of agency.•Visuo-tactile integration is a key for one's own and other's bodies in the brain.
The network between the parietal cortex and premotor cortex has a pivotal role in sensory-motor control. Grasping-related neurons in the anterior intraparietal area (AIP) and the ventral premotor cortex (F5) showed complementary properties each other. The object information for grasping is sent from the parietal cortex to the premotor cortex for sensory-motor transformation, and the backward signal from the premotor cortex to parietal cortex can be considered an efference copy/corollary discharge that is used to predict sensory outcome during motor behavior. Mirror neurons that represent both own action and other's action are involved in this system. This system also very well fits with body schema that reflects online state of the body during motor execution. We speculate that the parieto-premotor network, which includes the mirror neuron system, is key for mapping one's own body and the bodies of others. This means that the neuronal substrates that control one's own action and the mirror neuron system are shared with the “who” system, which is related to the recognition of action contribution, i.e., sense of agency. Representation of own and other‘s body in the parieto-premotor network is key to link between sensory-motor control and higher-order cognitive functions.
In this article, a novel dense underwater 3-D mapping paradigm based on pose graph simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) using an acoustic camera mounted on a rotator is proposed. The demands ...of underwater tasks, such as unmanned construction using robots, are growing rapidly. In recent years, the acoustic camera, which is a state-of-the-art forward-looking imaging sonar, has been gradually applied in underwater exploration. However, distinctive imaging principles make it difficult to gain an intuitive perception of an underwater environment. In this study, an acoustic camera with a rotator was used for dense 3-D mapping of the underwater environment. The proposed method first applies a 3-D occupancy mapping framework based on the acoustic camera rotating around the acoustic axis using a rotator at a stationary position to generate 3-D local maps. Then, scan matching of adjacent local maps is implemented to calculate odometry without involving internal sensors, and an approximate dense global map is built in real time. Finally, based on a graph optimization scheme, offline refinement is performed to generate a final dense global map. Our experimental results demonstrate that our 3-D mapping framework for an acoustic camera can achieve dense 3-D mapping of underwater environments robustly and accurately.
Neuromodulation techniques for modulating brain activity can affect performance in a variety of behaviors. Techniques including transcranial alternating current stimulation and random noise ...stimulation can modulate neural oscillations. However, the intervention effect of neuromodulation approaches on motor learning is poor, partly because the electroencephalography (EEG) power spectra associated with the motor learning process has not yet been fully elucidated. Therefore, we investigated the characteristics of EEG power spectra in the process of motor learning in 15 right-handed healthy participants (5 females; mean age = 22.8 ± 3.0 years). The motor task was a ball-rotation task in which participants rotated two balls in the palm of their left hand. Participants performed a pre-test, the motor learning tasks, and a post-test. In the motor learning tasks, twenty 60 s trials were performed in the clockwise (CW) direction. Before and after the motor learning tasks, CW and counterclockwise (CCW; control condition) tasks were performed for 60 s each as pre- and post-tests. Therefore, CW direction was set as a motor learning task, while CCW was a test-only control task. EEG was recorded during the tests and tasks, and the power spectra in the alpha, beta, and gamma oscillations were calculated and compared between pre- and post-tests. The results showed that in the CW post-test, the power of the gamma band in the left parietal areas and the right frontal area was significantly higher than in the pre-test. In the CCW, there was no significant difference in each band at each area between the pre- and post-tests. Our findings reveal the characteristics of the EEG spectra related to the motor learning process. These results may help to establish more effective neuromodulation approaches to modifying neural oscillations in motor learning, including in rehabilitation fields.
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