Physical effort fuels a feeling of ownership over our movements

When you move your body, how do you know that it was "you" who chose to move it? One answer comes from a computational perspective. Your brain builds expectations (known as a "forward model") about the outcomes of your planned movements, and when sensory information matches these predictions, this suggests your movement was internally generated. But that still leaves the mystery of how you acquire a feeling of subjective ownership. How do you know you willed the movement to happen? A theory with roots in early nineteenth-century philosophy states that the subjective feeling of effort is crucial to this sense of agency. Toil makes a movement our own. Now a team of experimental psychologists have used modern methods to put this classic idea to the test. Led by Jelle Demanet at Ghent University, the clever study took advantage of an implicit marker of volition called "intentional binding". This is the way the sensory consequences of our voluntary actions are perceived as having occurred closer in time to our action than they really did. If you deliberately flick a switch to make a light come on, intentional binding reduces the delay you perceive between your action and the light onset. Importantly for this study, increased intentional binding would be an indication that a movement felt more volitional. Thirty-six undergrads (8 men) took part. On each trial they watched a second hand rotating on a clock and pressed the space bar on a keyboard at a time of their choosing. A qua...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs