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Unconscious modulation of the conscious experience of voluntary control

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:swb:14-1181000414782-24817
Date05 June 2007
CreatorsLinser, Katrin
ContributorsTechnische Universität Dresden, Psychologie, Prof. Dr. Thomas Goschke, Prof. Dr. Thomas Goschke, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Prinz, Prof. Dr. Clemens Kirschbaum
PublisherSaechsische Landesbibliothek- Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek Dresden
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typedoc-type:doctoralThesis
Formatapplication/pdf

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