Abstract

Sense of agency—the feeling of being the author of one’s actions—may be a critical component of one’s sense of self and of one’s interaction with the world. Insights from clinical and experimental neuropsychology, as well as cognitive and computational neuroscience, have provided complementary evidence that the sense of agency arises from the integration of an array of internal and external cues. These frameworks can help to explain how disruptions in one or more of these cues may result in altered experiences of agency. This chapter reviews these explanatory frameworks and shows how important and useful they have become in making sense of an array of clinical observations, from the disorders of control and agency that result from circumscribed brain damage to the widespread attenuation of agency that may characterize psychosis in which no clear brain lesion has been identified.