Brain activation patterns during memory of cognitive agency.
Agency is the awareness that one's own self is the agent or author of an action, a thought, or a feeling. The implicit memory that one's self was the originator of a cognitive event - the sense of cognitive agency - has not yet been fully explored in terms of relevant neural systems. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we examined brain activation patterns differentiating memory for the source of previously self-generated vs. experimenter-presented word items from a sentence completion paradigm designed to be emotionally neutral and semantically constrained in content. Accurate memory for the source of self-generated vs. externally-presented word items resulted in activation of dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) bilaterally, supporting an emerging body of work that indicates a key role for this region in self-referential processing. Our data extend the function of mPFC into the domain of memory and the accurate retrieval of the sense of cognitive agency under conditions where agency was encoded implicitly.
Vinogradov
Sophia
S
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco and San Francisco VA Medical Center; 116C, 4150 Clement Street, San Francisco, CA 94121, USA. sophia.vinogradov@ucsf.edu
Luks
Tracy L
TL
Simpson
Gregory V
GV
Schulman
Brian J
BJ
Glenn
Shenly
S
Wong
Amy E
AE
D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D012016:Reference Values; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013060:Speech