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Losing Control in Social Situations: How the Presence of Others Affects Neural Processes Related to Sense of Agency

Social contexts substantially influence individual behavior, but little is known about how they affect cognitive processes related to voluntary action. Previously, it has been shown that social context reduces participants’ sense of agency over the outcomes of their actions and outcome monitoring. I...

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Autores principales: Beyer, Frederike, Sidarus, Nura, Fleming, Stephen, Haggard, Patrick
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Society for Neuroscience 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844060/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29527568
http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0336-17.2018
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author Beyer, Frederike
Sidarus, Nura
Fleming, Stephen
Haggard, Patrick
author_facet Beyer, Frederike
Sidarus, Nura
Fleming, Stephen
Haggard, Patrick
author_sort Beyer, Frederike
collection PubMed
description Social contexts substantially influence individual behavior, but little is known about how they affect cognitive processes related to voluntary action. Previously, it has been shown that social context reduces participants’ sense of agency over the outcomes of their actions and outcome monitoring. In this fMRI study on human volunteers, we investigated the neural mechanisms by which social context alters sense of agency. Participants made costly actions to stop inflating a balloon before it burst. On “social” trials, another player could act in their stead, but we analyzed only trials in which the other player remained passive. We hypothesized that mentalizing processes during social trials would affect decision-making fluency and lead to a decreased sense of agency. In line with this hypothesis, we found increased activity in the bilateral temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), precuneus, and middle frontal gyrus during social trials compared with nonsocial trials. Activity in the precuneus was, in turn, negatively related to sense of agency at a single-trial level. We further found a double dissociation between TPJ and angular gyrus (AG): activity in the left AG was not sensitive to social context but was negatively related to sense of agency. In contrast, activity in the TPJ was modulated by social context but was not sensitive to sense of agency.
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spelling pubmed-58440602018-03-09 Losing Control in Social Situations: How the Presence of Others Affects Neural Processes Related to Sense of Agency Beyer, Frederike Sidarus, Nura Fleming, Stephen Haggard, Patrick eNeuro New Research Social contexts substantially influence individual behavior, but little is known about how they affect cognitive processes related to voluntary action. Previously, it has been shown that social context reduces participants’ sense of agency over the outcomes of their actions and outcome monitoring. In this fMRI study on human volunteers, we investigated the neural mechanisms by which social context alters sense of agency. Participants made costly actions to stop inflating a balloon before it burst. On “social” trials, another player could act in their stead, but we analyzed only trials in which the other player remained passive. We hypothesized that mentalizing processes during social trials would affect decision-making fluency and lead to a decreased sense of agency. In line with this hypothesis, we found increased activity in the bilateral temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), precuneus, and middle frontal gyrus during social trials compared with nonsocial trials. Activity in the precuneus was, in turn, negatively related to sense of agency at a single-trial level. We further found a double dissociation between TPJ and angular gyrus (AG): activity in the left AG was not sensitive to social context but was negatively related to sense of agency. In contrast, activity in the TPJ was modulated by social context but was not sensitive to sense of agency. Society for Neuroscience 2018-03-08 /pmc/articles/PMC5844060/ /pubmed/29527568 http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0336-17.2018 Text en Copyright © 2018 Beyer et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
spellingShingle New Research
Beyer, Frederike
Sidarus, Nura
Fleming, Stephen
Haggard, Patrick
Losing Control in Social Situations: How the Presence of Others Affects Neural Processes Related to Sense of Agency
title Losing Control in Social Situations: How the Presence of Others Affects Neural Processes Related to Sense of Agency
title_full Losing Control in Social Situations: How the Presence of Others Affects Neural Processes Related to Sense of Agency
title_fullStr Losing Control in Social Situations: How the Presence of Others Affects Neural Processes Related to Sense of Agency
title_full_unstemmed Losing Control in Social Situations: How the Presence of Others Affects Neural Processes Related to Sense of Agency
title_short Losing Control in Social Situations: How the Presence of Others Affects Neural Processes Related to Sense of Agency
title_sort losing control in social situations: how the presence of others affects neural processes related to sense of agency
topic New Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844060/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29527568
http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0336-17.2018
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