Figure 1
From: Belief of agency changes dynamics in sensorimotor networks
Experimental task. Participants were asked to fixate a rhythmically flashed light stimulus and tap synchronously with this stimulus such that the impact of their right index finger on the armrest coincides with the flash. (A) After 4 successive hits inside the window of opportunity (blue, 75 ms duration) in the No-Agency (NA) state, the participant entered the Hidden Agency (HA) state, already triggering the flash (grey) time-locked to the tap (black), seen here in the last two taps. Now the windows of opportunity were adjusted to the previous tap (centered at 2/3 s post-tap). Importantly, there was no change in context light yet, thus the participant was not aware of being agent over the flash. A miss would directly switch the state back to NA from any other state. (B) After 4 succesive hits in the HA state, the Overt Agency OA state started and agency was indicated to the participant by a color change in the context light. The flash was still locked to the tap as before. After another 7–9 hits, the HA state was repeated Hidden Agency Control (HAC), by falsely indicating loss of agency for 4 succesive hits (not shown here) and then again with NA. Here the participant initially tapped slightly slower, then faster than 1.5 Hz, but stayed within the window of opportunity. (C) Participants passed sequentially through NA, HA, OA, and HAC as long as they managed to tap without misses. Grey indicates hypothesized neural activity for a given process (belief of a agency changing shortly after a change in context light, tapping related activity increasing for successive hits and context attention increasing transiently, when context light changes). This means that an effect related to the belief of agency should be apparent in the main contrast OA-HA and in the same direction in the control contrast OA-HAC. An effect related to successful tapping performance should change gradually over time, the longer the rhythm was kept and thus should show opposite effects for the main contrast compared to the control contrast. Note that the context cue changed color at the start of OA and HAC, but not HA.
