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Every movement requires the nervous system to solve a complex biomechanical control problem, but this process is mostly veiled from one's conscious awareness. Simultaneously, we also have conscious experience of controlling our movements - our sense of agency (SoA). Whether SoA corresponds to those neural representations that implement actual neuromuscular control is an open question with ethical, medical, and legal implications. If SoA is the conscious experience of control, this predicts that SoA can be decoded from the same brain structures that implement the so-called inverse kinematic computations for planning movement. We correlated human fMRI measurements during hand movements with the internal representations of a deep neural network (DNN) performing the same hand control task in a biomechanical simulation - revealing detailed cortical encodings of sensorimotor states, idiosyncratic to each subject. We then manipulated SoA by usurping control of participants' muscles via electrical stimulation, and found that the same voxels which were best explained by modeled inverse kinematic representations - which, strikingly, were located in canonically visual areas - also predicted SoA. Importantly, model-brain correspondences and robust SoA decoding could both be achieved within single subjects, enabling relationships between motor representations and awareness to be studied at the level of the individual.
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This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026
The relationship between monitoring, control, conscious awareness and attention in language production
This paper discusses the relationship between monitoring, control, conscious awareness, and attention in language production. Instead of focusing on a speci昀椀c theory, I will examine these relationships within a framework that accommodates multiple (complementary) monitoring views, and discuss key differences between situations where competition is resolved internally vs. those that recruit external control. The takeaway message is that production performance is optimized by self-regulating monitoring-control loops, which operate largely subconsciously, but conscious awareness can be —and often is— triggered by the monitor. When triggered, in conjunction with the control system, such awareness can lead to attentional control of both the primary production process, as well as the monitoring process. I will also touch upon the repair process and its relation to these issues, and end by discussing some of the open questions as possible avenues for future research.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2317121
- PAR ID:
- 10618355
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Neurolinguistics
- Volume:
- 74
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0911-6044
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 101247
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Language production, monitoring, control, attention, automaticity, conscious awareness
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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