The salience of an agency experience influences its ability to improve memory.

Previous work reported that having a strong sense of agency can enhance memory for acted-upon items: Memory enhancement is evident when there is a strong sense of agency, but not when there is only a weak sense of agency. However, because of the way trials are distributed across conditions in typical studies, it is often the case that a strong sense of agency may also be very salient because it is experienced only infrequently within the context of the experiment. In this study, we examined the importance of salience in determining the memory enhancement potential of a sense of agency.

Attention and expectation likely underlie temporal binding measured using the Libet Clock.

An interesting finding that has emerged in studies of the sense of agency is that of a perceived compression of the temporal interval between actions and the outcomes they produce. This is generally referred to as . Although temporal binding has been studied using various paradigms, possibly the most popular of these is the Libet Clock task.

Having a sense of agency can improve memory.

In most situations, we are able to tell those outcomes we cause from those we do not. By now, research has provided us with a reasonably good understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie this sense of agency - it is thought to be produced by a comparison between a prediction of the outcome and the actual outcome that occurs. What is less clear is whether having a sense of agency can, itself, influence cognition.

Outcome processing and the sense of agency.

People can distinguish outcomes they cause from those they do not; that is, they are quite able to sense self-agency in outcomes. A well-received idea is that the sense of agency is produced by a comparison between a predicted outcome and the actual outcome that occurs. While research has generally focused on understanding predictive representations and the comparison process, less work has been done on the actual outcomes and, in particular, how these are perceived or apprehended.

Learning in the Target Prevalence Effect.

Rare or low prevalence targets are detected less well than counterparts that occur with higher probability. It stands to reason, though, that before such a deficit is apparent, information about a given target's probability of occurrence must be apprehended. In this study, we investigated how much target experience is necessary for target probabilities to be fully acquired and established within mental task representations.

Outside influence: The sense of agency takes into account what is in our surroundings.

We are quite capable of distinguishing those outcomes we cause from those we do not. This ability to sense self-agency is thought to be produced by a comparison between a predictive representation of an outcome and the actual outcome that occurs. It is unclear, though, specifically what types of information can be entered into agency computations.

Attention and the sense of agency: A review and some thoughts on the matter.

Much is now known about the sense of agency and how it is produced. What is lacking, though, is an understanding of how it relates to other cognitive domains and operations. Here, the relationship between the sense of agency and attention is explored.

Striatal activity is modulated by target probability.

Target probability has well-known neural effects. In the brain, target probability is known to affect frontal activity, with lower probability targets producing more prefrontal activation than those that occur with higher probability. Although the effect of target probability on cortical activity is well specified, its effect on subcortical structures such as the striatum is less well understood.

A response time cost when different representations of an attended object are integrated.

When selected, attention is thought to spread across the whole of an object. Such spreading is thought to occur via the integration and mutual enhancement of the different mental representations of said object. Neurophysiological studies have demonstrated that such integration is not instantaneous with selection, but rather occurs after some delay.

Sleep deprivation produces feelings of vicarious agency.

A variety of self-related psychological constructs are supported by the fundamental ability to accurately sense either self-agency or lack of agency in some action or outcome. Agency judgments are typically studied in individuals who are well-rested and mentally-fresh; however, in our increasingly fast-paced world, such judgments often need to be made while in less optimal states. Here, we studied the effect of being in one such non-optimal state - when sleep-deprived - on judgments of agency.

Rare targets are less susceptible to attention capture once detection has begun.

Rare or low probability targets are detected more slowly and/ or less accurately than higher probability counterparts. Various proposals have implicated perceptual and response-based processes in this deficit. Recent evidence, however, suggests that it is attentional in nature, with low probability targets requiring more attentional resources than high probability ones to detect.

Dysconnectivity in the frontoparietal attention network in schizophrenia.

Cognitive impairment is common in patients with schizophrenia, and even those with relatively preserved function perform worse than healthy volunteers (HVs) on attentional tasks. This is consistent with the hypothesis that connectivity - in the frontoparietal network (FPN) activated during attention - is disrupted in schizophrenia. We examined attentional effects on connectivity in the FPN, in schizophrenia, using magnetoencephalography (MEG).

Preoccupied minds feel less control: sense of agency is modulated by cognitive load.

People have little difficulty distinguishing effects they cause and those they do not. An important question is what underlies this sense of agency. A prevailing idea is that the sense of agency arises from a comparison between a predictive representation of the effect (of a given action) and the actual effect that occurs, with a clear match between the two producing a strong sense of agency.

Why rare targets are slow: evidence that the target probability effect has an attentional locus.

Target probability has a well-known effect on detection times: Targets that occur with lower probability are detected more slowly than their higher-probability counterparts. A long-standing issue of interest is what causes this effect. In the two experiments of this study, we examined the possibility that the target probability effect has an attentional locus.

The trajectory of the target probability effect.

The effect of target probability on detection times is well-established: Even when detection accuracy is high, lower probability targets are detected more slowly than higher probability ones. Although this target probability effect on detection times has been well-studied, one aspect of it has remained largely unexamined: How the effect develops over the span of an experiment. Here, we investigated this issue with two detection experiments that assessed different target probability ratios.

Different types of target probability have different prefrontal consequences.

One of the factors known to affect target detection is target probability. It is clear, though, that target probability can be manipulated in different ways. Here, in order to more accurately characterize the effects of target probability on frontal engagement, we examined the effects of two commonly-used but different target probability manipulations on neural activity.

Evidence for long-range feedback in target detection: Detection of semantic targets modulates activity in early visual areas.

In a variety of attention and search tasks, single-cell recordings of the primate brain have frequently shown an enhancement of responses in early visual areas to selected target stimuli. This enhancement is observed only at longer latencies, suggesting the possibility that it reflects the action of feedback or return signals from upstream processing areas. However, in typical studies, targets are specified on the basis of elementary visual features; as these are coded at multiple levels of the visual system, it is impossible to determine where enhanced target processing begins.

A discussion of the role of frontoparietal activity in cognition.

A consistently observed pattern in the functional brain imaging literature is that of joint frontal and parietal activation. Because this pattern of activation has been observed under many different experimental conditions and when different cognitive domains have been tested, it is likely that frontoparietal activity plays a very general role in cognition. This article considers one such possible role--the representation of behaviorally relevant information.

Frontoparietal activity with minimal decision and control.

In the human brain, a well known frontoparietal circuit, including lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), presupplementary motor area/anterior cingulate cortex (pre-SMA/ACC), and both the superior and inferior parietal cortex, is involved in cognitive control. One proposal is that the frontoparietal cortex holds a flexible description of attended or task-relevant information, biasing processing in favor of this information in many different parts of the brain. Here, we separate frontoparietal coding of attended information from its active use in behavior.

Frequency of concrete words modulates prefrontal activation during semantic judgments.

The effect of word frequency on semantic processing was characterized by studying two groups of right-handed participants using fMRI. Stimuli were presented in blocks of either high frequency or low frequency word triplets where a sample word appeared above a pair of test words. One group (n = 8) made semantic judgments by selecting the word from the test pair that was more closely associated with the sample.