Sense of agency can be defined as the self-awareness of bodily movement, whereas extended agency as the self-awareness of affecting, through movement, events concomitant with movement. As a distinctive manifestation of agency, we review Spizzo's effect. This effect arises when agents coordinate their rhythmic movements with visual pulses. Once coordination is established, agents feel controlling the onset or the offset of the pulses through their movements. Spizzo's effect, therefore, constitutes a manifest case of extended agency, in which agents are aware (...) of controlling, through movement, the pulses temporally concomitant with movement. We propose that sense of agency requires continuity of kinesthesia, which in turn requires the continuity of selfhood. The continuity of kinesthesia is necessarily deduced from the consistent kinematics observed in movements, whereas the continuity of selfhood may stem from the patterns of rhythmic coordination that humans encounter ever since intrauterine life. The primacy of these patterns in adults is in accordance with phenomena such as Spizzo's effect, which require coordination to be induced. We, therefore, propose coordination as the fundamental interaction from which selfhood, kinesthesia, and agency arise. (shrink)

Novice designers produced a sequence of sketches while inventing a logo for a novel brand of soft drink. The sketches were scored for the presence of specific objects, their local features and global composition. Self‐assessment scores for each sketch and art critics' scores for the end products were collected. It was investigated whether the design evolves in an essentially random fashion or according to an overall heuristic. The results indicated a macrostructure in the evolution of the design, characterized by two (...) stages. For the majority of participants, the first stage is marked by the introduction and modification of novel objects and their local and global aspects; the second stage is characterized by changes in their global composition. The minority that showed the better designs has a different strategy, in which most global changes were made in the beginning. Although participants did not consciously apply these strategies, their self‐assessment scores reflect the stages of the process. (shrink)

Le débat sur les relations esprit–cerveau a été centré sur des questions relatives au libre arbitre. J’examine ce débat et conclus que les neurosciences n’ont pas de raisons méthodologiques, ontologiques ou théoriques convaincantes, pas plus que de raisons empiriques, pour rejeter la notion de libre arbitre. Parallèlement, je reconnais que la question est très controversée, à la fois en science et dans la société. Le problème se situe dans l’incompatibilité entre notions scientifiques du cerveau et notions pré-scientifiques de l’esprit. Par (...) conséquent, je propose d’envisager les relations esprit–cerveau sur une base empirique plus profonde et incontestée que l’on peut trouver dans la psychophysique. Je discute deux cas dans lesquels le contenu d’une expérience psychophysique, et sa dynamique, correspondent à la dynamique cérébrale. Dans un cas, la correspondance est une identité de type; dans l’autre, il s’agit d’une instanciation multiple : plusieurs types radicalement différents d’activités donnent lieu à la même dynamique perceptive. Ces deux exemples illustrent que, bien que l’identité des types soit possible, elle peut être souvent hautement contextualisée. Par conséquent, on doit appréhender les relations esprit–cerveau une par une plutôt que les fonder d’un seul bloc. (shrink)

Our actions are continuously shaped by what we perceive. When a hammer is picked up, this is done in one smooth movement, the hand adjusting in anticipation to the scale and position of the target. But the opposite is also true: what we perceive is determined by our actions. We tend to see those properties of the world which are meaningful for our everyday actions. Interpretation figures in normal seeing: we see an object as a hammer, a person as a (...) friend. (shrink)