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LIT-1009: Sense of agency in the human brain

2 min read

Properties5
StatusActive — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-827) in full; worth reading as a compact map of the experimental study of the sense of agency in its narrow, motor sense: the experience of controlling a specific act and its outcome, set apart from self-efficacy and from the social attribution of authorship. Read it as a review by an author whose group ran most of the studies it reports, with no effect sizes given. Its distinctive claim is that the experience has a prospective component, from action selection and outcome prediction, that psychosis seems to remove; its most quotable result is that coercive instruction reduces the implicit sense of agency.
Version2
Tagsagency, neuroscience
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-827 — Haggard — Sense of agency in the human brain
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-300 — Acting on a coercive instruction reduces the implicit sense of agency over the outcome, compared with freely choosing the same action, THEORY-322 — The sense of agency over an action's outcome draws on prospective signals from action selection and outcome prediction, not only on retrospective comparison of outcome with prediction

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Haggard, P. (2017). Sense of agency in the human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 18(4), 196–207. DOI 10.1038/nrn.2017.14.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-827.

  • A narrow construct. The sense of agency is “the experience of controlling one’s own motor acts and, through them, the course of external events”. It is not self-efficacy, and it is not the social attribution of an action to an agent. Involuntary movement brings ownership without agency.
  • Two kinds of measure. Explicit judgements overestimate one’s own agency, more so for good outcomes. Implicit measures, intentional binding and interval estimates, correlate only weakly with them. Binding alone is not diagnostic, only differences in it between conditions.
  • Prospective as well as retrospective. On trials where an expected tone did not come, action binding was stronger when the tone had been likely. Ease of choosing an action raised the sense of control over an outcome it did not predict. In schizophrenia, binding depended only on whether the tone actually came.
  • Against a single comparator. The comparator model explains the feeling of non-agency but produces no signal for the positive experience. The review proposes frontal–parietal connectivity as the correlate.
  • Coercion. Acting on an experimenter’s instruction lengthened perceived action–outcome intervals and reduced the auditory N1 to the outcome, compared with free choice of the same act.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-12 at the owner’s request to fill a gap: the record held nothing on the cognitive neuroscience of the experience of agency. Read in full on 2026-10-14 (NOTE-827) from the author’s accepted manuscript.

Two accounts are filed from it: THEORY-322, on the prospective component of the sense of agency, and THEORY-300, on reduced agency under coercive instruction. It bears on QUESTION-048, as a worked case of what explicit, implicit and deficit evidence each show about one experience, and on QUESTION-070 through the coercion result. It sets aside the self-efficacy sense of “agency” that Bandura’s paper (LIT-1005), filed alongside it, is about.

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