46 research outputs found

    Beyond the “urge to move”: objective measures for the study of agency in the post-Libet era

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    The investigation of human volition is a longstanding endeavor from both philosophers and researchers. Yet because of the major challenges associated with capturing voluntary movements in an ecologically relevant state in the research environment, it is only in recent years that human agency has grown as a field of cognitive neuroscience. In particular, the seminal work of Libet et al. (1983) paved the way for a neuroscientific approach to agency. Over the past decade, new objective paradigms have been developed to study agency, drawing upon emerging concepts from cognitive and computational neuroscience. These include the chronometric approach of Libet’s study which is embedded in the “intentional binding” paradigm, optimal motor control theory and most recent insights from active inference theory. Here we review these principal methods and their application to the study of agency in health and the insights gained from their application to neurological and psychiatric disorders. We show that the neuropsychological paradigms that are based upon these new approaches have key advantages over traditional experimental designs. We propose that these advantages, coupled with advances in neuroimaging, create a powerful set of tools for understanding human agency and its neurobiological basis

    Dopaminergic modulation of positive expectations for goal-directed action: evidence from Parkinson's disease.

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    Parkinson's disease (PD) impairs the control of movement and cognition, including the planning of action and its consequences. This provides the opportunity to study the dopaminergic influences on the perception and awareness of action. Here we examined the perception of the outcome of a goal-directed action made by medicated patients with PD. A visuomotor task probed the integration of sensorimotor signals with the positive expectations of outcomes (Self priors), which in healthy adults bias perception toward success in proportion to trait optimism. We tested the hypotheses that (i) the priors on the perception of the consequences of one's own actions differ between patients and age- and sex-matched controls, and (ii) that these priors are modulated by the levodopa dose equivalent (LDEs) in patients. There was no overall difference between patients and controls in the perceptual priors used. However, the precision of patient priors was inversely related to their LDE. Patients with high LDE showed more accurate priors, representing predictions that were closer to the true distribution of performance. Such accuracy has previously been demonstrated when observing the actions of others, suggesting abnormal awareness of action in these patients. These results confirm a link between dopamine and the positive expectation of the outcome of one's own actions, and may have implications for the management of PD.This work was funded by the Wellcome Trust [103838], Medical Research Council (MC-A060-5PQ30), and the James S McDonnell Foundation 21st Science Initiative award on Understanding Human Cognition; NW was funded by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and the Raymond and Beverley Sackler Foundation.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Frontiers via http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0151

    Apathy is associated with reduced precision of prior beliefs about action outcomes.

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    Apathy is a debilitating syndrome that is associated with reduced goal-directed behavior. Although apathy is common and detrimental to prognosis in many neuropsychiatric diseases, its underlying mechanisms remain controversial. We propose a new model of apathy, in the context of Bayesian theories of brain function, whereby actions require predictions of their outcomes to be held with sufficient precision for "explaining away" differences in sensory inputs. In the active inference model, apathy results from reduced precision of prior beliefs about action outcomes. We tested this hypothesis using a visuomotor task in healthy adults (N = 47), with experimental manipulation of physical effort and financial reward. Bayesian modeling of performance and participants' perception of their performance was used to infer the precision of their priors. We confirmed that the perception of performance was biased toward the target, which was accounted for by relatively precise prior beliefs about action outcomes. These priors were consistently more precise than the corresponding performance distribution, and were scaled to effort and reward. Crucially, prior precision was negatively associated with trait apathy, suggesting that apathetic individuals had less precise prior beliefs about action outcomes. The results support a Bayesian account of apathy that could inform future studies of clinical populations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

    Seeing what you want to see: priors for one's own actions represent exaggerated expectations of success.

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    People perceive the consequences of their own actions differently to how they perceive other sensory events. A large body of psychology research has shown that people also consistently overrate their own performance relative to others, yet little is known about how these "illusions of superiority" are normally maintained. Here we examined the visual perception of the sensory consequences of self-generated and observed goal-directed actions. Across a series of visuomotor tasks, we found that the perception of the sensory consequences of one's own actions is more biased toward success relative to the perception of observed actions. Using Bayesian models, we show that this bias could be explained by priors that represent exaggerated predictions of success. The degree of exaggeration of priors was unaffected by learning, but was correlated with individual differences in trait optimism. In contrast, when observing these actions, priors represented more accurate predictions of the actual performance. The results suggest that the brain internally represents optimistic predictions for one's own actions. Such exaggerated predictions bind the sensory consequences of our own actions with our intended goal, explaining how it is that when acting we tend to see what we want to see.We thank J. D. Carlin for his help with acquiring eye gaze data. This work was funded by the Wellcome Trust [088324], Medical Research Council and a Scholar Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Initiative: understanding human cognition (to James B. Rowe) as well as the Human Frontier Science Program and the Royal Society Noreen Murray Professorship in Neurobiology (to Daniel M. Wolpert); Noham Wolpe was funded by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and the Raymond and Beverley Sackler Foundation.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Frontiers via http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2014.0023

    Publisher Correction: Sensory attenuation in Parkinson's disease is related to disease severity and dopamine dose.

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    A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper

    Time on timing: Dissociating premature responding from interval sensitivity in Parkinson's disease.

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    BACKGROUND: Parkinson's disease (PD) can cause impulsivity with premature responses, but there are several potential mechanisms. We proposed a distinction between poor decision-making and the distortion of temporal perception. Both effects may be present and interact, but with different clinical and pharmacological correlates. OBJECTIVES: This study assessed premature responding during time perception in PD. METHODS: In this study, 18 PD patients and 19 age-matched controls completed 2 temporal discrimination tasks (bisection and trisection) and a baseline reaction-time task. Timing sensitivity and decision-making processes were quantified by response and response time. An extended version of the modified difference model was used to examine the precision of time representation and the modulation of response time by stimulus ambiguity. RESULTS: In the bisection task, patients had a lower bisection point (P < .05) and reduced timing sensitivity when compared with controls (P < .001). In the trisection task, patients showed lower sensitivity in discriminating between short and medium standards (P < .05). The impairment in timing sensitivity correlated positively with patients' levodopa dose equivalent (P < .05). Critically, patients had disproportionately faster response times when compared with controls in more ambiguous conditions, and the degree of acceleration of response time increased with disease severity (P < .05). Computational modeling indicated that patients had poorer precision in time representation and stronger modulation of response time by task ambiguity, leading to smaller scaling of the decision latency (P < .05). CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that timing deficits in PD cannot be solely attributed to perceptual distortions, but are also associated with impulsive decision strategies that bias patients toward premature responses. © 2016 The Authors. Movement Disorders published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.This work was supported by the Medical Research Council (MC-A060-5PQ50), the Wellcome Trust (103838), Parkinson’s UK, Gates Foundation and the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Wiley via https://doi.org/10.1002/mds.266 3

    Longitudinal effect of clozapine-associated sedation on motivation in schizophrenia: naturalistic longitudinal study.

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    Negative symptoms of schizophrenia manifest as reduced motivation and pleasure (MAP) and impaired emotional expressivity (EXP). These can occur as primary phenomena, but have also been suggested to occur secondary to other clinical factors, including antipsychotic-induced sedation. However, this relationship has not been established formally. Here, we examined the effect of antipsychotic-induced sedation (assessed via the proxy of total daily sleep duration) on MAP and EXP in a cohort of 187 clozapine-treated patients with schizophrenia followed for over 2 years on average, using multilevel regression and mediation models. MAP, but not EXP, was adversely influenced by sedation, independently of the severity of psychosis or depression. Moreover, clozapine impaired MAP indirectly by worsening sedation, but after accounting for clozapine-induced sedation, clozapine improved MAP. Our results highlight the importance of addressing sedative side-effects of antipsychotics to improve clinical outcomes

    Activity and Connectivity Differences Underlying Inhibitory Control Across the Adult Life Span.

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    Inhibitory control requires precise regulation of activity and connectivity within multiple brain networks. Previous studies have typically evaluated age-related changes in regional activity or changes in interregional interactions. Instead, we test the hypothesis that activity and connectivity make distinct, complementary contributions to performance across the life span and the maintenance of successful inhibitory control systems. A representative sample of healthy human adults in a large, population-based life span cohort performed an integrated Stop-Signal (SS)/No-Go task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (n = 119; age range, 18-88 years). Individual differences in inhibitory control were measured in terms of the SS reaction time (SSRT), using the blocked integration method. Linear models and independent components analysis revealed that individual differences in SSRT correlated with both activity and connectivity in a distributed inhibition network, comprising prefrontal, premotor, and motor regions. Importantly, this pattern was moderated by age, such that the association between inhibitory control and connectivity, but not activity, differed with age. Multivariate statistics and out-of-sample validation tests of multifactorial functional organization identified differential roles of activity and connectivity in determining an individual's SSRT across the life span. We propose that age-related differences in adaptive cognitive control are best characterized by the joint consideration of multifocal activity and connectivity within distributed brain networks. These insights may facilitate the development of new strategies to support cognitive ability in old age.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The preservation of cognitive and motor control is crucial for maintaining well being across the life span. We show that such control is determined by both activity and connectivity within distributed brain networks. In a large, population-based cohort, we used a novel whole-brain multivariate approach to estimate the functional components of inhibitory control, in terms of their activity and connectivity. Both activity and connectivity in the inhibition network changed with age. But only the association between performance and connectivity, not activity, differed with age. The results suggest that adaptive control is best characterized by the joint consideration of multifocal activity and connectivity. These insights may facilitate the development of new strategies to maintain cognitive ability across the life span in health and disease
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