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Self-agency
Self-agency, also known as the phenomenal will, is the sense that actions are self-generated. Scientist Benjamin Libet was the first to study it, concluding that brain activity predicts the action before one even has conscious awareness of his or her intention to act upon that action (see Neuroscience of free will). Daniel Wegner later defined the three criteria of self-agency: priority, exclusivity, and consistency. According to Wegner, priority means that an action must be planned before the action is initiated. The interval between the action and the effect is known as the intentional binding. Another criterion for self-agency is exclusivity, which means the effect is due to the person's action and not because of other potential causes for the effect. The last criterion Wegner suggested was consistency. Consistency means that one's planned action must occur as planned. Internal motor cues are also an indicator in deciding whether an action occurred through self-agency, and can b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Benjamin Libet
Benjamin Libet (; April 12, 1916 – July 23, 2007) was an American neuroscientist who was a pioneer in the field of human consciousness. Libet was a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco. In 2003, he was the first recipient of the ''Virtual Nobel Prize in Psychology'' from the University of Klagenfurt, "for his pioneering achievements in the experimental investigation of consciousness, initiation of action, and free will". Life He was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. Gamer Libitsky, his paternal grandfather, came to America in 1865 from a town called Brusilov in Ukraine. His mother, Anna Charovsky, emigrated from Kiev in 1913. His parents first met in Chicago. They were married in 1915, and somewhat over nine months later Benjamin was born. He had a brother Meyer, and a sister Dorothy. Libet attended a public elementary school and John Marshall High School. In 1939, Libet graduated from the University of Chicago, where ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neuroscience Of Free Will
Neuroscience of free will, a part of neurophilosophy, is the study of topics related to free will (Volition (psychology), volition and sense of agency) using neuroscience, and the analysis of how findings from such studies may impact the free will debate. As it has become possible to study the living human brain, researchers have begun to watch neural decision-making processes at work. Studies have revealed unexpected things about Agency (philosophy), human agency, moral responsibility, and consciousness in general. One of the pioneering studies in this domain was conducted by Benjamin Libet and colleagues in 1983 and has been the foundation of many studies in the years since. Other studies have attempted to predict participant actions before they make them, explore how we know we are responsible for voluntary movements as opposed to being moved by an external force, or how the role of consciousness in decision making may differ depending on the type of decision being made. Phil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Wegner
Daniel Merton Wegner (June 28, 1948 – July 5, 2013) was an American social psychologist. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was known for applying experimental psychology to the topics of mental control (for example ironic process theory) and conscious will, and for originating the study of transactive memory and action identification. In ''The Illusion of Conscious Will'' and other works, he argued that the human sense of free will is an illusion. Early life and education Wegner was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. When Wegner was 11 years old he developed an understanding of two types of scientists: "bumblers, who plod along, only once in a while accomplishing something but enjoying the process even if they often end up being wrong, and the pointers, who do only one thing: point out that the bumblers are bumbling." He enrolled in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fritz Heider
Fritz Heider (19 February 1896 – 2 January 1988) was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published ''The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations'', which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception (Malle, 2008). It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had already circulated through a small group of social psychologists. Biography Heider was born in Vienna, Austria on February 19, 1896 but he grew up in Graz. His family was Jewish. During his childhood, Heider sustained a serious eye injury which later turned him quite serious and shy in his adolescence. Because of his injury, Heider avoided the draft during World War I. With his father’s encouragement, Heider enrolled to study architecture at the University of Graz. After growing tired of studyin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marianne Simmel
Marianne Leonore Simmel (3 January 1923 – 24 March 2010) was a German-American psychologist with a special interest in cognitive neuropsychology. The granddaughter of famed sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, she was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Jena, Thuringia, Germany, to doctors Hans Eugen Simmel, a professor, and his wife, Else Rose, a pediatrician. She had younger siblings Eva Barbara, Arnold Georg and Gerhard Friedrich. She immigrated to the United States in March 1940 with her family as a stateless refugee and applied for citizenship later that year. The family was initially divided across New York City; the parents stayed at a lodging house while their children lived at various friends' homes. At age 17, with only an eighth-grade education, she initially lived in Queens, working as a housekeeper for another Jewish family. Nine years later, she received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and later served on the faculty at the College of Medicine at the Un ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Illusion Of Control
The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events. It was named by U.S. psychologist Ellen Langer and is thought to influence gambling behavior and belief in the paranormal. Along with illusory superiority and optimism bias, the illusion of control is one of the positive illusions. Definition The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events, for example, when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence. The illusion might arise because a person lacks direct introspective insight into whether they are in control of events. This has been called the introspection illusion. Instead, they may judge their degree of control by a process which is often unreliable. As a result, they see themselves as responsible for events to which there is little or no causal link. For example, in one study, college students were in a virtual reality setting to t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sense Of Agency
The sense of agency (SA), or sense of control, is the subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world.Jeannerod, M. (2003). The mechanism of self-recognition in human. Behavioural Brain Research, 142, 1-15. It is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that it is I who is executing bodily movement(s) or thinking thoughts. In non-pathological experience, the SA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership" (SO), which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm (while you remained passive) you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership (SO) for that movement. However, you would not have felt that you were the author of the movement; you would not have a sense of agency (SA).Gallagher, S. (2000). Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a noninvasive form of brain stimulation in which a changing magnetic field is used to induce an electric current at a specific area of the brain through electromagnetic induction. An electric pulse generator, or stimulator, is connected to a magnetic coil connected to the scalp. The stimulator generates a changing electric current within the coil which creates a varying magnetic field, inducing a current within a region in the brain itself.NICE. January 201Transcranial magnetic stimulation for treating and preventing migraine/ref>Michael Craig Miller for Harvard Health Publications. July 26, 201Magnetic stimulation: a new approach to treating depression?/ref> TMS has shown diagnostic and therapeutic potential in the central nervous system with a wide variety of disease states in neurology and mental health, with research still evolving. Adverse effects of TMS appear rare and include fainting and seizure. Other potential issues include ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Event-related Potential
An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sense, sensory, cognition, cognitive, or motor system, motor event. More formally, it is any stereotyped electrophysiology, electrophysiological response to a stimulus. The study of the brain in this way provides a Invasiveness of surgical procedures, noninvasive means of evaluating brain functioning. ERPs are measured by means of electroencephalography (EEG). The magnetoencephalography (MEG) equivalent of ERP is the ERF, or event-related field. Evoked potentials and induced potentials are subtypes of ERPs. History With the discovery of the electroencephalogram (EEG) in 1924, Hans Berger revealed that one could measure the electrical activity of the human brain by placing electrodes on the scalp and amplifying the signal. Changes in voltage can then be plotted over a period of time. He observed that the voltages could be influenced by external events that stimulated the sens ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bayesian Inference
Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference is an important technique in statistics, and especially in mathematical statistics. Bayesian updating is particularly important in the dynamic analysis of a sequence of data. Bayesian inference has found application in a wide range of activities, including science, engineering, philosophy, medicine, sport, and law. In the philosophy of decision theory, Bayesian inference is closely related to subjective probability, often called "Bayesian probability". Introduction to Bayes' rule Formal explanation Bayesian inference derives the posterior probability as a consequence of two antecedents: a prior probability and a "likelihood function" derived from a statistical model for the observed data. Bayesian inference computes the posterior probability according to Bayes' theorem: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Will
Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. Whether free will exists, what it is and the implications of whether it exists or not are some of the longest running debates of philosophy and religion. Some conceive of free will as the right to act outside of external influences or wishes. Some conceive free will to be the capacity to make choices undetermined by past events. Determinism suggests that only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with a libertarian model of free will. Ancient Greek philosophy identified this issue, which remains a major focus o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-efficacy
In psychology, self-efficacy is an individual's belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals. The concept was originally proposed by the psychologist Albert Bandura. Self-efficacy affects every area of human endeavor. By determining the beliefs a person holds regarding their power to affect situations, self-efficacy strongly influences both the power a person actually has to face challenges competently and the choices a person is most likely to make. These effects are particularly apparent, and compelling, with regard to investment behaviors such as in health, education, and agriculture. A strong sense of self-efficacy promotes human accomplishment and personal well-being. A person with high self-efficacy views challenges as things that are supposed to be mastered rather than threats to avoid. These people are able to recover from failure faster and are more likely to attribute failure to a lack of effort. They approach threatening situations with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
