title: Unconscious modulation of the conscious experience of voluntary control.
abstract: How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here, we argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one's own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the self. In a subliminal priming paradigm we show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany. linser@psychomail.tu-dresden.de
authors.forename: Katrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Linser
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Goschke
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003243:Consciousness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D013359:Sublimation, Psychological; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D014836:Volition