Socio-affective influences on neural and behavioural correlates of agency

• Applicant: Dr. Frederike Beyer
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2015 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 277014500

The Sense of Agency (SoA) describes the subjective feeling that a given event was caused by our own voluntary action. Normal human functioning, especially in a social context, depends on an intact SoA in order to allocate responsibility and estimate the control one has over a given situation. However, SoA is likely influenced by a range of contextual and affective variables, which are scarcely understood to date. It is the aim of the proposed project to investigate changes in neural and behavioural correlates of agency due to three factors: social exclusion, which affects a person`s control and self-esteem in a social interaction; feeling of shame, which is associated with the perception of uncontrollable failure to meet important standards; and acting as part of a group, which has been shown to lead to the diffusion of responsibility. Understanding variability in the experience of agency due to social and affective influences will improve our understanding of important changes in perception, cognition and behaviour due to these influences. In three different experimental manipulations, we will induce social exclusion, feeling of shame and the experience of acting as part of a group rather than individually. As a behavioural measure of agency we will use the intentional binding effect. Intentional binding describes the phenomenon that the interval between a button press and a subsequent tone is underestimated if the subject perceives that the tone was elicited by their own voluntary button press. We expect that intentional binding will be reduced following social exclusion, as well as following shame induction and when participants perceive the effect to be caused by a group action. We will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural networks related to changes in agency due to social exclusion and shame. In the experiment implementing group vs. individual action, we will use EEG to investigate changes in the neural processing of an action`s effect. This work will improve our understanding of how agency is affected by everyday socio-affective situations and elucidate potential mechanisms by which these situations influence human behaviour.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Dr. Patrick Haggard