A key constituent of the “self” is subjective agency. Subjective agency refers to our ability to identify whether or not our movements and actions (and their sensory consequences) are caused by ourselves. Deficits of this ability do, accordingly, dissolve the border between self and non-self, as is the case in Schizophrenia patients suffering from delusions of influence (DoI). These patients do, for instance, misattribute agency for their own actions to “alien forces”. In my presentation I will first focus on an ongoing study in which we estimated intentional binding in healthy subjects vs. Schizophrenia patients. Intentional binding is considered an implicit marker for a “sense of agency”. It refers to the phenomenon that the temporal onsets of an intentional action and a sensory effect are bound together in subjective time. As was expected, Schizophrenia patients suffering from DoI lacked intentional binding. I will further demonstrate that the lack of intentional binding in patients with DoI could be explained through imprecise “forward models”: Forward models predict the sensory consequences of one’s movements, allowing one to infer whether or not a perceived movement/action is self-produced (because the sensory prediction matches the perceived movement). I will provide experimental evidence that internal forward models are specifically altered in Schizophrenia patients with DoI. Finally, I will speculate how imprecise forward models could explain (i) the lack of intentional binding in Schizophrenia patients with DoI, (ii) patients’ overreliance on reactive (rather than predictive) information, and (iii) their “disorder of agency”.

please visit also Axel Lindner's website: http://nocolab.axel-lindner.info