Activating memories of depression alters the experience of voluntary action
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Volition
Activating memories of depression alters the experience of voluntary action Sukhvinder S. Obhi · Kristina M. Swiderski · Riley Farquhar
Received: 17 September 2012 / Accepted: 5 December 2012 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
Abstract The sense of agency is a profoundly important human experience and is strongly linked to volitional action. The importance of this experience is underscored by the fact that many neurological and psychiatric disorders are partially characterized by an abnormal sense of agency (e.g., schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression). Healthy participants perceive the temporal interval between a voluntary action and its effect to be shorter than it actually is, and this illusion has been suggested as an implicit index of agency. Here, we investigated whether activating memories of depression alters perception of this action–effect interval, compared to activating memories of the previous day, or a baseline condition in which specific memories were not activated. Results showed that action–effect interval estimates were significantly longer after remembering a depressing episode than after remembering the previous day, or in the baseline condition. Thus, activating memories of depression alters the experience of voluntary actions and effects. We suggest that interval estimation measures could be useful in clinical settings, to implicitly assess the sense of agency in patients with disorders affecting their sense of control. In this way, obtaining action–effect interval estimates, pre-, during, and post-treatment, could aid in tracking treatmentinduced changes in the sense of agency.
S. S. Obhi (*) · K. M. Swiderski · R. Farquhar Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] S. S. Obhi · K. M. Swiderski · R. Farquhar Department of Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada
Keywords Agency · Depression · Volitional action · Sense of agency · Authorship over action · Priming · Interval estimation
Introduction The experimental psychology of action has mostly concerned itself with the processes that produce and control voluntary movements (Passingham 1993; Rosenbaum 1991; Haggard 2001; Obhi and Haggard 2004; Obhi and Goodale 2005; Kalaska 2009). In contrast, the experience of voluntary action has received less research attention (but see Haggard 2008). The sense of agency is one of the most important and pervasive feelings surrounding voluntary action (Strother et al. 2010; Gallagher 2000). The feeling of control over the actions we make, and the effects they produce, is crucial to our sense of ourselves as purposeful organisms (Obhi and Haggard 2005). Despite this importance, humans do not routinely dwell on this experience; instead, the sense of agency seems to be somehow woven into the processes that produce purposeful behavior and is “just there.” For example, if I realize that it is getting dark outside and I flick the light switch, and the light turns on, although I fully understand, and a
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