Plasticity of the sense of agency

The sense of agency is the consciousness of controlling our own volitional actions. It is based on deciding, initiating and executing actions, observing their consequences and comparing them with our expectations. All these processes occur in a few hundreds of milliseconds in the case of simple motor actions. The aim of this project is to identify the timeline of the build-up of this sense of agency and to manipulate it in a group of healthy participants. We will use brain activity (recorded with magnetoencephalography or MEG) and pupil and gaze signals (recorded with an eyetracker) to detect motor preparation in order to manipulate the timing at which participants receive feedback for their actions. We will evaluate whether the sense of agency is disturbed by our intervention and how it can be regained.