Prepared to stop: how sense of agency in a preceding trial modulates inhibitory control in the current trial.

Feeling in control of actions and events can enhance motivation for further actions. How this sense of agency (SoA) in fact influences flexible motor control remains poorly understood. Here, we investigated the effect of SoA on subsequent response inhibition in a modified go/no-go task with EEG recordings.

Ready to go: Higher sense of agency enhances action readiness and reduces response inhibition.

Sense of agency is the subjective feeling of being in control of one's actions and their effects. Many studies have elucidated the cognitive and sensorimotor processes that drive this experience. However, less is known about how sense of agency influences flexible cognitive and motor control.

Function without feeling: neural reactivity and intercommunication during flexible motor adjustments evoked by emotional and neutral stimuli.

Motor conflicts arise when we need to quickly overwrite prepotent behavior. It has been proposed that affective stimuli modulate the neural processing of motor conflicts. However, previous studies have come to inconsistent conclusions regarding the neural impact of affective information on conflict processing.

Clinical Manifestations of Body Memories: The Impact of Past Bodily Experiences on Mental Health.

Bodily experiences such as the feeling of touch, pain or inner signals of the body are deeply emotional and activate brain networks that mediate their perception and higher-order processing. While the ad hoc perception of bodily signals and their influence on behavior is empirically well studied, there is a knowledge gap on how we store and retrieve bodily experiences that we perceived in the past, and how this influences our everyday life. Here, we explore the hypothesis that negative body memories, that is, negative bodily experiences of the past that are stored in memory and influence behavior, contribute to the development of somatic manifestations of mental health problems including somatic symptoms, traumatic re-experiences or dissociative symptoms.

The Interplay Between Affective Processing and Sense of Agency During Action Regulation: A Review.

Sense of agency is the feeling of being in control of one's actions and their perceivable effects. Most previous research identified cognitive or sensory determinants of agency experience. However, it has been proposed that sense of agency is also bound to the processing of affective information.

Action inhibition in individuals with high obsessive-compulsive trait of incompleteness: An ERP study.

Background: Missing action completion signals are assumed to trigger repetitive behavior and feelings of the action "not being right". This proposal is based mostly on individual's self-reports. Here, we investigated the influence of experimentally manipulated action completion experience and the obsessive-compulsive (OC) trait of incompleteness on behavioral and neurophysiological measures of action inhibition.

Interoceptive cardiac expectations to emotional stimuli predict visual perception.

Previous work exploring the interplay between the processing of internal bodily signals and the perception of external events suggests a correlative relationship between both domains. Here, we demonstrate an experimentally induced link between visual perception and the emotional modulation of interoceptive cardiac signals. We pair an emotion repetition-suppression paradigm shown to modulate neural responses to heartbeats with a previously reported visual detection task.

I feel what I do: Relating interoceptive processes and reward-related behavior.

Interoceptive signalling has been shown to contribute to action regulation and action experience. Here, we assess whether motor behaviour can be influenced by anticipated homeostatic feeling states induced through different predictable contexts. Participants performed a reward incentive paradigm in which accurate responses increased (gain) or avoided the depletion (averted loss) of a credit score.

Sensitivity to CT-optimal, Affective Touch Depends on Adult Attachment Style.

Affective touch supports affiliative bonds and social cognition. In particular, gentle, stroking touch, which has recently been associated with the C Tactile (CT) system, is typically perceived as pleasant and prosocial. However, it remains unknown whether pre-existing models of social relating influence the perception of CT-optimal touch.

Affective interoceptive inference: Evidence from heart-beat evoked brain potentials.

The perception of internal bodily signals (interoception) is central to many theories of emotion and embodied cognition. According to recent theoretical views, the sensory processing of visceral signals such as one's own heartbeat is determined by top-down predictions about the expected interoceptive state of the body (interoceptive inference). In this EEG study we examined neural responses to heartbeats following expected and unexpected emotional stimuli.

Dissociable sources of erogeneity in social touch: Imagining and perceiving C-Tactile optimal touch in erogenous zones.

Previous research points to two major hypotheses regarding the mechanisms by which touch can be experienced as erotogenic. The first concerns the body part to which touch is applied (erogenous zones) and the second the modality of touch (sensual touch optimal in activating C Tactile afferents). In this study, we explored for the first time the relation between those two mechanisms in actual and imagined social touch.

Cardiac interoceptive learning is modulated by emotional valence perceived from facial expressions.

Interoception refers to the processing of homeostatic bodily signals. Research demonstrates that interoceptive markers can be modulated via exteroceptive stimuli and suggests that the emotional content of this information may produce distinct interoceptive outcomes. Here, we explored the impact of differently valenced exteroceptive information on the processing of interoceptive signals.

The Interaction between Interoceptive and Action States within a Framework of Predictive Coding.

The notion of predictive coding assumes that perception is an iterative process between prior knowledge and sensory feedback. To date, this perspective has been primarily applied to exteroceptive perception as well as action and its associated phenomenological experiences such as agency. More recently, this predictive, inferential framework has been theoretically extended to interoception.

Exteroceptive expectations modulate interoceptive processing: repetition-suppression effects for visual and heartbeat evoked potentials.

Interoception refers to the signaling of internal bodily commands. Here, we explore repetition suppression of intero- and exteroceptive neural markers to test whether the perception and predictability of exteroceptive stimulus material affects their expression. Participants completed a repetition suppression paradigm in which angry or neutral facial expressions repeated or alternated.

Towards a common framework of grounded action cognition: Relating motor control, perception and cognition.

The relation between motor control and action cognition - including action-related thoughts and action-related perception - has been subject to controversial discussions in the last three decades. During these decades, cognitive neuroscience has been increasingly confronted with a huge variety of different accounts trying to understand and explain the relation between these systems, their interdependencies and the mediating mechanisms by establishing notions such as "internal models", "simulation" or "shared representation". These accounts, however, include a large array of partly overlapping, partly contradictory theories using similar terms for different mechanisms and different terms for similar mechanisms.

Active Interpersonal Touch Gives Rise to the Social Softness Illusion.

Social touch plays a powerful role in human life, with important physical and mental health benefits in development and adulthood. Touch is central in building the foundations of social interaction, attachment, and cognition, and early, social touch has unique, beneficial neurophysiological and epigenetic effects. The recent discovery of a separate neurophysiological system for affectively laden touch in humans has further kindled scientific interest in the area.

Doing good or bad: How interactions between action and emotion expectations shape the sense of agency.

The emotional consequences of our own and others' actions can influence our agentive self-awareness in social contexts. Positive outcomes are usually linked to the self and used for self-enhancement, whereas negative outcomes are more often attributed to others. In most situations, these causal attribution tendencies seem to be immediately present instead of involving reflective interpretations of the action experience.

Affective coding: the emotional dimension of agency.

The sense of agency (SoA) (i.e., the registration that I am the initiator and controller of my actions and relevant events) is associated with several affective dimensions.

Dysfunctional forward model mechanisms and aberrant sense of agency in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Background: Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often lack the experience of action completion and have altered feelings of agency. This might depend on the integrity of predictions of action outcomes generated by forward models of the motor system. Such motor predictions are critical for inhibitory gating of actions and their consequences.

Reliability of sensory predictions determines the experience of self-agency.

This study examines the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the sense of agency, that is, the experience of causing and controlling events in our environment. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that the sense of agency depends on an optimal integration of different anticipatory signals, generated by motor and nonmotor systems. An established marker of pre-reflective agency experience is the suppression of cortical responses to actively generated feedback as compared to passively observed feedback, which was measured here by event-related potentials (ERPs).

I did it: unconscious expectation of sensory consequences modulates the experience of self-agency and its functional signature.

The ability to recognize oneself in voluntary action is called the sense of agency and refers to the experience of causing one's own actions and their sensory consequences. This form of self-awareness is important not only for motor control but also for social interactions and the ascription of causal responsibility. Here, we examined the sense of agency at early and prereflective stages of action perception using ERPs.

Dissociable medial frontal negativities from a common monitoring system for self- and externally caused failure of goal achievement.

Goal-directed behavior requires the ability to adapt performance strategies based on the attribution of unintended outcomes to internal or external causes. Using event-related brain potentials, the present research compared neural activity following self-generated errors induced by a flanker task and following externally generated errors induced by supposed "technical malfunctions". Errors and malfunctions were associated with temporally dissociable ERP components, the short-latency error-related negativity (ERN) and the longer-latency feedback-related negativity (FRN), respectively.