Neural correlates of an illusionary sense of agency caused by virtual reality.
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) January 31, 2024 Yiyang Cai, Huichao Yang, Xiaosha Wang et al. 9 citations
The sense of agency—the feeling that one's actions cause events—can arise through two mechanisms: prospective (based on motor predictions) and reconstructive (based on retrospective reasoning). Temporal binding, a measure often linked to implicit agency, occurs even when passively observing another's action, supporting the reconstructive mechanism. Using virtual reality and fMRI, participants who controlled an avatar hand and then passively observed the avatar's action showed increased temporal binding. This effect correlated with activity in the right angular gyrus and inferior parietal lobule, brain regions involved in inference and agency processing. The findings suggest that controlling an avatar can enhance inferential processing in the right inferior parietal cortex, producing an illusory sense of agency without voluntary movement.