CiteULike: Group: Glimcher_Lab - with tag agency

Medial prefrontal activity differentiates self from close others

Tf Heatherton — 2007-04-20T15:51:16-00:00

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2006)

A key question in psychology and neuroscience is the extent to which the neural representation of others is incorporated with, or is distinct from, our concept of self. Recent neuroimaging research has emphasized the importance of a region in the medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC; Brodmann's area (BA) 10] when performing self-referent tasks. Specifically, previous studies have reported selective MPFC recruitment when making judgments about the self relative to a familiar but personally unknown other. The present event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study extends these findings to judgments about personally known others. Subjects were imaged while making trait adjective judgments in one of the three conditions: (i) whether the adjective described the self; (ii) whether the adjective described an intimate other (i.e., a best friend); or (iii) whether the adjective was presented in uppercase letters. Making judgments about the self relative to an intimate other selectively activated the MPFC region previously implicated in the self-processing literature. These results suggest that while we may incorporate intimate others into our self-concept, the neural correlates of the self remain distinct from intimate and non-intimate others.

On the inference of personal authorship: enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information.

H Aarts — 2007-04-13T16:10:39-00:00

Conscious Cogn, Vol. 14, No. 3. (September 2005), pp. 439-458.

Three experiments examined whether the mere priming of potential action effects enhances people's feeling of causing these effects when they occur. In a computer task, participants and the computer independently moved a rapidly moving square on a display. Participants had to press a key, thereby stopping the movement. However, the participant or the computer could have caused the square to stop on the observed position, and accordingly, the stopped position of the square could be conceived of as the potential effect resulting from participants' action of pressing the stop key. The location of this position was primed or not just before participants had to stop the movement. Results showed that (subliminal as well as supraliminal) priming of the position enhanced experienced authorship of stopping the square. Additional experimentation demonstrated that this priming of agency was not mediated by the goal or intention to produce the effect.

Altruism is associated with an increased neural response to agency

Dharol Tankersley — 2007-01-26T20:53:43-00:00

Nat Neurosci, Vol. 10, No. 2. (February 2007), pp. 150-151.