Abstract
Sense of Agency (SoA) refers to the experience of controlling external events. SoA is considered to have predictive and postdictive aspect. Recent studies have investigated the relationship between SoA and event-related potentials, but these studies focused only on the postdictive aspect, while the brain activities related to the predictive aspect of SoA remain unclear. In the present study, we focused on readiness potential (RP) and examined the influence of prediction of SoA on RP. In the experiment, participants pressed a key to trigger a tone, and the event-related potentials before and after the key-press was recorded. In the normal predictive condition, all the tones were presented after key-press, thus participants could predict that their key-press would probably cause a tone. In contrast, in the low predictive condition, one third of the tones were presented before the key-presses, thus the causability of key-presses on tones were doubtful. The results indicated earlier RP in the normal predictive condition relative to the low predictive condition, although the difference did not reach significant level due to the small sample size. We will increase participants to confirm the difference in RP between the two predictive conditions in future work. We believe that our work provides important knowledge for the understanding of the neural basis of SoA.
