How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here I argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one’s own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the self. In a subliminal priming paradigm I show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:swb:14-1181000414782-24817 |
| Date | 05 June 2007 |
| Creators | Linser, Katrin |
| Contributors | Technische Universität Dresden, Psychologie, Prof. Dr. Thomas Goschke, Prof. Dr. Thomas Goschke, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Prinz, Prof. Dr. Clemens Kirschbaum |
| Publisher | Saechsische Landesbibliothek- Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek Dresden |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:doctoralThesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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