Predictive and retrospective association of action and sensory feedback in healthy subjects and clinical disorders of the sense of agency(renewal proposal as part of the project "Neural coding of causality in instrumental behavior")

• Applicant: Dr. Max-Philipp Stenner
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2012 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213424015

The belief of controlling one`s actions and, through them, sensory feedback is fundamental to instrumental behaviour. Previous research has revealed two distinct components of this pre-reflective sense of agency. Predictive agency ascriptions reflect anticipation of stimulus causation, while retrospective inference on agency is based on sensory evidence of the action - outcome contingency. The distinction between the two can help to determine how independent or dependent the belief of controlling events in the world can be of their objective contingency on the observer`s action. This is of particular relevance when the subjective belief of control is decoupled from objective control, such as in schizophrenia or in patients with alien-limb phenomena in cortico-basal degeneration. Based on results of the first period of funding, the project proposed here studies predictive and retrospective components of two perceptual phenomena previously shown to reflect causal control over sensory events. These are sensory attenuation and temporal action binding, which refer to a decrease in perceived stimulus intensity and a shift of the subjective time of an action towards its outcome, respectively. By combining magnetoencephalography with perceptual paradigms, the project aims to 1) determine neurophysiological principles of the interaction between motor processing and perception during action-outcome anticipation, particularly the role of anticipatory neural oscillations in sensory attenuation, 2) dissociate predictive from retrospective temporal action binding and 3) study the role of motor cortical neural oscillations during action preparation for predictive temporal action binding. In addition to these studies on healthy subjects, further experiments on three clinical populations will 4) test for an imbalance of predictive and retrospective temporal action binding in schizophrenia and cortico-basal degeneration and 5) determine the role of dopaminergic neurotransmission for retrospective action binding as a function of the affective valence of the action-outcome, particularly when dopaminergic neurotransmission is deficient, such as in Parkinson's disease.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Dr. Raymond J. Dolan, Ph.D.