Hierarchical Event-Control and Subjective Experience of Agency

at which “self” gets attached could change as an organism continues to interact with the environment in the context of an intentional goal, moving across different levels in the hierarchy at different times. Empirical data from studies exploring the link between sense of self and event-control (Jordan, 2003; Kumar and Srinivasan, under review) suggest that participant’s sense of self does vary with the amount of control that they can exercise. We have studied the emergence of self as a function of different levels in a event-control hierarchy using a multi-agent paradigm (Kumar and Srinivasan, under review). When control is manipulated at multiple levels, self gets attached to the higher/more distal level at which control can be successfully exercised. When the exercise of control is poor at a higher level, the sense of self attaches to the lower (more proximal) level of eventcontrol. The results also show that when people misidentify as some other agent pursuing a common goal, misidentification is more when the other agent affords a greater experienced control (again in a hierarchical fashion). The results based on event-control approach is consistent with the studies that have shown a link between the feeling of control and the subjective experience of agency (Frith, 2005; Moore et al., 2009; Dewey et al., 2010; Desantis et al., 2011). The event-control approach goes beyond other hierarchical predictive coding models of subjective experience (Frith, 2005; Seth et al., 2012), not conceptualizing self in terms of what is happening at the prefixed top-level module in the hierarchy. It visualizes a dynamic fluid self that depends on control exercised at a particular level and changes as a function of an organism’s interactions with the environment. This enables us to understand changes in self A commentary on