The central topic of this paper is to study joint intention to perform a joint action or to bring about a certain state. Here are some examples of such joint action: You and I share the plan to carry a heavy table jointly upstairs and realize this plan, we sing a duet together, we clean up our backyard together, and I cash a check by acting jointly with you, a bank teller, and finally we together elect a new president for (...) our country. In these cases the participants can be said to have a joint intention jointly or as a group to carry the table upstairs: the content of the intention involves our performing something together and the pronoun “we” refers to us, viz. you and me and the possible other participants considered together. When we jointly intend to carry the table, each of us can be said to.. (shrink)

This paper gives an up-to-date account of we-intentions and responds to some critics of the author’s earlier work on the topic in question. While the main lines of the new account are basically the same as before, the present account considerably adds to the earlier work. For one thing, it shows how we-intentions and joint intentions can arise in terms of the so-called Bulletin Board View of joint intention acquisition, which relies heavily on some underlying mutually accepted conceptual and situational (...) presuppositions but does not require agreement making or joint intention to form a joint intention. The model yields categorical, unconditional intentions to participate in the content of the we-intention and joint intention (viz. shared we-intention upon analysis). The content of a we-intention can be, but need not be a joint action. Thus a participant alone cannot settle and control the content of the intention. Instead the participants jointly settle the content and control the satisfaction of the intention. These and some other features distinguish we-intentions from “action intentions”, viz. intentions that an agent can alone settle and satisfy. The paper discusses weintentions (and other “aim-intentions”) from this perspective and it also defends the author’s earlier account against a charge of vicious circularity that has been directed against it. (shrink)

After a long period of neglect, the phenomenology of action has recently regained its place in the agenda of philosophers and scientists alike. The recent explosion of interest in the topic highlights its complexity. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework allowing for a more precise characterization of the many facets of the phenomenology of agency, of how they are related and of their possible sources. The key assumption guiding this attempt is that the processes through (...) which the phenomenology of action is generated and the processes involved in the specification and control of action are strongly interconnected. I argue in favor of a three-tiered dynamic model of intention, link it to an expanded version of the internal model theory of action control and specification, and use this theoretical framework to guide an analysis of the contents, possible sources and temporal course of complementary aspects of the phenomenology of action. (shrink)

The sense of agency is a central aspect of human self-consciousness and refers to the experience of oneself as the agent of one’s own actions. Several different cognitive theories on the sense of agency have been proposed implying divergent empirical approaches and results, especially with respect to neural correlates. A multifactorial and multilevel model of the sense of agency may provide the most constructive framework for integrating divergent theories and findings, meeting the complex nature of this intriguing phenomenon.

This paper on the phenomenology of joint agency proposes a foray into a little explored territory at the intersection of two very active domains of research: joint action and sense of agency. I explore two ways in which our experience of joint agency may differ from our experience of individual agency. First, the mechanisms of action specification and control involved in joint action are typically more complex than those present in individual actions, since it is crucial for joint action that (...) people coordinate their plans and actions. I discuss the implications that these coordination requirements might have for the strength of the sense of agency an agent may experience for a joint action. Second, engagement in joint action may involve a transformation of agentive identity and a partial or complete shift from a sense of self-agency to a sense of we-agency. I discuss several factors that may contribute to shaping our sense of agentive identity in joint action. (shrink)

The sense of agency has received much attention in the context of individual action but not in the context of joint action. We investigated how the sense of agency developed during individual and dyadic performance while people learned a haptic coordination task. The sense of agency increased with better performance in all groups. Individuals and dyads showed a differential sense of agency after initial task learning, with dyads showing a minimal increase. The sense of agency depended on the context in (...) which the task was first learnt, as transfer from joint to individual performance resulted in an illusory boost in the sense of agency. Whereas the quality of performance related to the sense of agency, the generated forces to achieve the task did not. Our findings are consistent with a predictive model account at the perceptual level, such that the sense of agency relies most strongly on sharable perceptual information. (shrink)

We investigated how motor agency in the voluntary control of body movement influences body awareness. In the Rubber Hand Illusion , synchronous tactile stimulation of a rubber hand and the participant’s hand leads to a feeling of the rubber hand being incorporated in the participant’s own body. One quantifiable behavioural correlate of the illusion is an induced shift in the perceived location of the participant’s hand towards the rubber hand. Previous studies showed that the induced changes in body awareness are (...) local and fragmented: the proprioceptive drift is largely restricted to the stimulated finger. In the present study, we investigated whether active and passive movements, rather than tactile stimulation, would lead to similarly fragmented body awareness. Participants watched a projected image of their hand under three conditions: active finger movement, passive finger movement, and tactile stimulation. Visual feedback was either synchronous or asynchronous with respect to stimulation of the hand. A significant overall RHI, defined as greater drifts following synchronous than asynchronous stimulation, was found in all cases. However, the distribution of the RHI across stimulated and non-stimulated fingers depended on the kind of stimulation. Localised proprioceptive drifts, specific to the stimulated finger, were found for tactile and passive stimulation. Conversely, during active movement of a single digit, the proprioceptive drifts were not localised to that digit, but were spread across the whole hand. Whereas a purely proprioceptive sense of body-ownership is local and fragmented, the motor sense of agency integrates distinct body-parts into a coherent, unified awareness of the body. (shrink)