Upcoming Dahlonega Science Cafes
Science Cafes take place monthly on Monday nights at the Bourbon Street Grille in downtown Dahlonega, unless otherwise stated.
Aug 26, 2024
7 p.m.
Are You in Control?
Dr. John Dewey
Origins of the Sense of Agency
People regularly distinguish between events we do and do not control. For example, voluntary movements are usually easy to distinguish from passive movements caused by external forces. The sense of agency (SoA) refers to a feeling (or judgment) of willfully controlling something. It has been described as the “feeling of doing”. These intuitions are relevant to legal and moral concepts of responsibility, as people tend to feel less responsibility for actions or outcomes they did not control. But how does a person determine whether they are in control of a situation to begin with? What processes give rise to a SoA, and what are the implications for control systems with a human element? In this talk, I will discuss theories and empirical findings regarding the processes which give rise to the SoA, as well as the important question of how SoA should be measured. I argue that the SoA is unlikely to be a unitary phenomenon, and provide evidence that alternative operationalizations tap into different aspects of the phenomenon. I conclude that SoA emerges from a combination of predictive motor and perceptual processes and post-hoc causal inferences.
Dr. Dewey joined the Department of Psychological Sciences at UNG-Dahlonega in the fall of 2016. He has a doctoral degree in Psychology from Michigan State University with concentration in cognition and cognitive neuroscience, and a master’s degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Georgia. His research focuses on the sense of agency, i.e. the sensation of controlling one’s body and the environment. He is also broadly interested in social cognition.
