Unconscious modulation of the conscious experience of voluntary control

How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here I argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one’s own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the self. In a subliminal priming paradigm I show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects.

Level thesis:degree_level

thesis.doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher

Technische Universität Dresden

Year

2007

Author dc:creator

• Linser, Katrin

Contributors dc:contributor

• Goschke, Thomas
• Prinz, Wolfgang
• Kirschbaum, Clemens

• subliminal priming
• masked priming
• conscious will
• experience of control
• illusion of control
• effect-anticipation
• unconscious effect-anticipation
• voluntary action
• control
• Kontrollerleben
• Willenserfahrung
• Priming
• Effekantizipation
• unbewusste Effektantizipation
• willentliches Handeln
• Kontrolle
• Wille