Abstract
Sense of Agency (SoA), i.e. one's awareness of being in control of one's actions, has become a topic of growing interest in recent years. Disturbance of this capacity seems to be a crucial aspect of some psychiatric condition as seen for example in delusion of control or thought insertion.
Synofzik et al. (2008) regard SoA as being comprised of two sub-processes - Feeling of Agency (FoA), which is more immediate and pre-conceptual, and Judgement of Agency (JoA) referring to higher level inference. According to the comparator and also Bayesian model of SoA, a discrepancy between expectations and actual sensory inputs is an error signal and can lead to attribution of self-produced action to another agent.
Seth (2013) applies predictive models also to interoception and advances that disturbances in interoceptive predictions might underlay some psychopathological conditions as anxiety or autism. In our study we would like to test a) whether non-attended interoceptive bodily signals can carry an error message and thus influence FoA and JoA (and to what degree); b) whether cognitive processing of those signals might modulate the possible effect of bodily signals; c) possible modulating influence of more stable personality traits (e.g. anxiety) on processes described above.