ذهن غایب و عوامل غایب: توجه ناشی از گذر از خودبیگانگی آژانس

We report a novel task designed to elicit transient attention-lapse induced alienation (ALIA) of agency experiences in normal participants. When attention-related action slips occur during the task, participants reported substantially decreased self control as well as a high degree of perceived agency attributed to the errant hand. In addition, participants reported being surprised by, and annoyed with, the actions of the errant hand. We argue that ALIA experiences occur because of constraints imposed by the close and precise temporal relations between intention formation and a contrary action employed in this paradigm. We note similarities between ALIA experiences and anarchic hand sign (AHS) and argue that, despite important differences, both ALIA experiences and AHS phenomenology reflect failures of executive control to intervene and cancel contrary affordance-driven habitual motor plans.

Sometimes you become aware of something that you wanted to do only after you have done it. Your body decided for you, it picked a desire and carried it out. – Wu Ming – Momodou To be an agent means, most fundamentally, to be in control of one’s own bodily actions. Phenomenologically, this entails the feeling that one’s actions “obey” one’s concurrent action intentions. Yet surprisingly few of our everyday actions are explicitly willed. In everyday life, automatic behaviors are likely much more common than explicitly intended actions (e.g., Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). Most often, these actions are functional and accomplish what we take to have been our implicit goals. Occasionally, however, our automatic actions do go awry. Everyday cases of dysfunctional automaticity include absent-minded actions when, for example: I remove the wrapping from a candy, walk over to a garbage bin and, to my almost immediate chagrin, discard the candy with one hand and retain the wrapper in the other. I reach into a bathroom cabinet for a bottle of aspirin, and am surprised to find myself a few moments later brushing my teeth. These examples highlight everyday action slips (Norman, 1981 and Reason, 1979) as failures of self-awareness during instrumental action (Baars, 1992, Baars, 1993, Eilan and Roessler, 2003, Heckhausen and Beckman, 1990 and Zhu, 2004). Note that the examples describe not simple reflex movements but skilled, goal-directed actions, though inconsistent with concurrent intentions. People often react to such absent-minded actions, their common occurrence notwithstanding, with surprise, embarrassment, and annoyance. Such unintended actions are generally brought to our attention via unexpected, and usually unwanted, action outcomes. In the present paper we explore whether action slips that occur during bouts of mind wandering can at times lead to more than mere feelings of automaticity but rather elicit the feeling that the body part involved in the action slip willfully violated one’s intentions as if it had a mind of its own (i.e., an alienation of agency). The behavioral pattern during action slips such as those described above is reminiscent of the uncontrolled behaviors of individuals with an Anarchic Hand Sign (AHS; cf. Della Sala, 2005, Eilan and Roessler, 2003 and Marcel, 2003), a condition characterized by episodes such as the following: A man is sitting watching television. He reaches out with one hand and selects a program. His other hand, to his chagrin, selects another channel (Parkin & Barry, 1996). A diner finishes a meal but observes with horror that one hand continues to put food from another person’s plate to her mouth (Della Sala, Marchetti, & Spinnler, 1994). Patients react to their misbehaving hands with surprise, embarrassment, and annoyance (Della Sala et al., 1994). In addition they often personify the hand and address it as a different and difficult person having a “will of its own” (Della Sala et al., 1994). The foregoing examples illustrate core features of AHS and highlight the actions of the anarchic hand, like action slips, not as simple reflexes but as well-executed, goal-directed actions (Marchetti & Della Sala, 1998). Nonetheless, these actions are experientially independent of the explicit concurrent goals and intentions of their owners (Biran et al., 2006, Della Sala et al., 1991, Della Sala et al., 1994, Feinberg et al., 1992, Goldberg, 1985, Goldberg and Bloom, 1990, Kritikos et al., 2005, Marchetti and Della Sala, 1998 and Parkin and Barry, 1996). Though patients deny having volitional control over such actions, they do not deny ownership of, or fail to recognize, the offending hand as their own, in contrast to neurological conditions with which AHS is often confused (Della Sala et al., 1991 and Della Sala et al., 1994). Nor do they deny that the unwanted actions occurred or even that the actions are intentional. Rather, the intentions do not seem to be their concurrent intentions and hence agency is transferred from self to hand. Such patients have experienced not merely a loss, but an active alienation, of agency for the anarchic actions. Finally, such patients are not delusional. As one patient put it: “Of course I know that I am doing it. It just doesn’t feel like me” ( Marcel, 2003, p. 79). Though AHS phenomena initially seem uncanny and remote from normal human experience, similarities to absent-minded actions of normal individuals are, upon reflection, quite striking and raise the possibility that absent-minded action could, under specific circumstances lead to the experience of alienation even in otherwise normal individuals. Indeed, parallels between AHS and normal cognition have been drawn before (e.g., Humphreys and Riddoch, 2003 and Riddoch et al., 2000), as well as specific analogies between absent-minded actions and AHS (Della Sala, 2005 and Eilan and Roessler, 2003). Indeed, there is evidence of increased absent-mindedness associated with AHS, in the form of frequent tapping, scratching, and fidgeting with objects (Biran et al., 2006). It is also the case that AHS patients do not always become aware of the anarchic movements of their affected hands (Biran et al., 2006). Moreover, the surprise evinced the AHS patient when attending to his errant hand’s actions is perhaps not different in kind from the experience of seeing one’s candy disappear into a rubbish bin, or of being startled by the sound of a ring or pen hitting the floor and realizing that we must have been absent-mindedly “fiddling” with the object. Of course, absent-minded action slips seldom lead to outright anarchic experiences. They are very brief and innocuous compared to AHS experiences though they would appear to instantiate at least some of the conditions for such experiences as they do, for example, entail complex, functional activities. Critically, however, what absent-minded slips seldom entail are activities that are explicitly countermanded by our current intentions and this lack of conflict with our intentions likely prevents even blatant absent-minded action slips from typically being perceived as explicit violations of agency.