One of the most exciting aspects of human consciousness is the sensation that we cause actions and that we are personally involved in the direct consequences those actions have. This sensation, also known as agency, is of great importance to the way we perceive the world and to the way we see ourselves as having an important role in that world. Agency motivates us to regulate our behavior, helps us learn from the mistakes we make, enables us to distinguish the actions we perform compared to the actions performed by other individuals, makes us feel good about ourselves when we are successful, but can also give us a bad feeling when our actions lead to undesirable outcomes. This sense of agency therefore seems to be ‘rather‘ important, but where does it actually come from? While we may intuitively feel that we should know when we have caused something to occur and when not, the research described in the present dissertation reveals that the sense of agency can be influenced by a number of different factors, including contextual action cues and internal action plans, the presence and nature of other agents, as well as hand dominance and experiences of effort. Importantly, experiences of agency in turn seem to influence our susceptibility to external forces and our ability to cause self-driven change. The present findings thereby further our knowledge on how, why, and when the sense of agency emerges and how that pervasive experience influences us in turn.

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Promotores : Dijksterhuis, A.J., Baaren, R.B. van

Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 16 april 2015