What is the human sense of agency, and is it metacognitive

Abstract

Agency refers to an individual's capacity to initiate and perform actions, and thus to bring about change, both in their own state, and in the state of the outside world. The importance of agency in human life cannot be understated. Social responsibility is built on the principle that there are facts of agency, on which individuals can generally agree. At the individual level, the experience of agency is considered a crucial part of normal mental life. Abnormal sense of agency (SoA)-such as in the well-documented delusion of control-is recognised as one of the key symptoms of mental disorders. Yet, beyond abnormalities of control that pertain to psychiatric conditions, normal SoA can be easily fooled. Errors in agency attribution and agency experience have received much attention in recent experimental literature. In everyday life, coincidental conjunctions between our actions and external events commonly occur. The fact that the SoA can be over or underestimated, or that judgements of agency can be wrong, testifies to a significant gap between what individuals think or believe their control capabilities are, and what these capabilities really are. The ability to experience these computations as the causes driving and shaping our actions may account for our ability to correct our behaviours when, precisely, they seem to escape our control. In this sense, any reliable theory about human agency must explain how we can sometimes be deluded about our own agency, but also must account for why we are not deluded all the time. In this chapter, we first identify which signals may contribute to an SoA, and how they might be integrated. We will ask whether human cognition of agency is best analysed as an experience or as an inference. We evaluate the existing data in relation to two contrasting accounts for agency, namely prospective versus purely retrospective approaches. We draw on two major classes of data throughout: psychological data that aims to capture the experience of agency, and physiological data that aims to identify the neural basis of this experience. Finally, we will consider whether the human SoA should really be called 'metacognitive'. In particular, we directly compare key features of metacognition of agency with perceptual metacognition.