Abstract

This chapter argues that the experience of authorship strongly depends on the capacity to form predictions about the outcome of an action. It reviews cognitive psychology and neuroscience research indicating that subjective agency experience depends on the integrity of outcome predictions generated by internal forward models in the brain. Outcome predictions can be used for filtering sensory input through a continuous comparison with the actual sensory feedback. Current computational models explaining agency in terms of forward modeling and predictive coding are discussed. Moreover, scientific work has demonstrated that dysfunctional outcome prediction may contribute to aberrant agency experience in schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the role and nature of internal predictions underlying functional and dysfunctional experience of agency—critically distinguishing the psychological and neural mechanisms operating at different phenomenological levels of agency.