Mechanisms of social agency

自我能动性，即通过自己的行为引起事件的感觉，是日常生活的核心。法律和道德责任源于一个人“拥有”他/她的行为及其后果的理解。这种代理感（SoA）的机制已经得到了广泛的研究。SoA要么通过要求人们判断其行为的因果关系来显式地衡量，要么通过衡量有意约束的程度来隐式地衡量。后者指的是动作与其效果[1]之间感知时间的压缩。然而，令人惊讶的是，大多数关于能动性的研究都考察了简单的动作，比如按下按钮，而在日常生活中，我们的大多数行为都是互动，尤其是与他人的互动。少数在直接社会互动中考察SoA的研究[2-3]并没有调查社会互动中最有趣的方面，即对方的自愿行为是我的行为的后果。这个跨学科的项目，结合了社会心理学和神经科学的方法，旨在通过系统地揭示SoA在社会环境中的机制来填补这一巨大的知识空白。由于社会互动中的他人也是一个自愿的主体，与无生命的对象相比，我们期望SoA的体验是不同的。具体地说，社交SoA将依赖于识别对方是代理，这部分依赖于确定对方有多个选项和使用这些选项的选择。为了验证这一点，我们将要求参与者执行一个动作（原因），然后跟随另一个（重新）动作（结果），并评估他们对这个因果序列的所有权感。这种所有权将被显式（主观评级）和隐式（有意绑定）测量。在一系列的三个实验中，我们将使用两种不同的交际模式（手部运动和凝视），我们将1)测试与人类或无生命物体互动的效果，同时操纵因果之间的持续时间，以评估SoA在社会与非社会背景下的时间演变；2)通过探究第一实验结果背后的脑电图成分来检验社会SoA的神经机制；3)研究系统操作的效果：a)从一个纯粹无生命的物体到一个完全有生命的主体的社会性（例如，从移动的点到移动的眼睛）；b)另一个可用选项的数量。我们预测，在较长的行动效应间隔内，社会SoA比其非社会等效SoA最强，并且其强度受到对方被视为代理的程度的强烈调节。该项目的结果不仅会揭示社会互动的基础，而且还会对a)社会中法律和道德责任的标准以及b)社会互动的失败（如自闭症和精神分裂症）产生影响，因此可能有助于提供改善对这些个体的护理的解决方案。

Self-agency, the feeling of causing an event through one's own actions, is central to everyday life. Legal and moral accountability stems from the understanding that a person 'owns' his/her actions and their consequences. The mechanisms underlying this Sense of Agency (SoA) have been studied extensively [1]. SoA has been measured either explicitly by means of asking people to judge the causality of their action, or implicitly by measuring the degree of intentional binding. The latter refers to the compression of perceived time between an action and its effect [1]. Surprisingly, however, most studies of agency have examined simple actions like button presses, whereas in everyday life most of our actions are interactions, particularly with other individuals. The few studies that examine SoA in direct social interactions [2-3] do not investigate the most interesting aspect of social interactions where the other's voluntary action is the consequence of my action.Project.This interdisciplinary project, combining approaches from social psychology and neuroscience, is designed to fill in this large knowledge gap by systematically uncovering the mechanisms of the SoA in social contexts. Since the other in social interactions is also a voluntary agent, in contrast to inanimate objects, we expect that the SoA is experienced differently. In specific, the social SoA will depend on discerning that the other is an agent, which in part relies on ascertaining that the other has multiple options and a choice of using those options. To test this, we will ask participants to perform an action (cause) which is then followed by the other's (re)action (effect) and assess their sense of ownership of this cause-effect sequence. This ownership will be measured explicitly (subjective ratings) and implicitly (intentional binding). In a series of three experiments, using two distinct paradigms across two communicative modalities (hand movements and gaze), we will1) test the effect of interacting with a human or an inanimate object while manipulating the duration between the cause and effect to assess the temporal evolution of the SoA in social versus non-social contexts;2) examine the neural mechanisms of social SoA by probing the electroencephalographic (EEG) components underlying the outcomes obtained in the first experiment;3) study the effect of systematically manipulating a) the social-ness of the other from a purely inanimate object to a fully animate agent (e.g., moving dots to moving eyes) and b) the number of available options for the other. We predict that the social SoA is strongest at longer action-effect intervals than its non-social equivalent and that its strength is strongly modulated by the degree to which the other is perceived as an agent.The outcomes of this project would not only shed light on the foundations of social interactions, but also have implications for a) the standards for legal and moral responsibility in the society, and b) failures of social interactions, such as in autism and schizophrenia, and hence might help provide solutions to improve care for such individuals.