Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2018 Jan;10(1):18-35.
doi: 10.1111/tops.12305. Epub 2017 Nov 3.

From Adult Finger Tapping to Fetal Heart Beating: Retracing the Role of Coordination in Constituting Agency

Affiliations
Free article
Review

From Adult Finger Tapping to Fetal Heart Beating: Retracing the Role of Coordination in Constituting Agency

Alessandro Solfo et al. Top Cogn Sci. 2018 Jan.
Free article

Abstract

Sense of agency can be defined as the self-awareness of bodily movement, whereas extended agency as the self-awareness of affecting, through movement, events concomitant with movement. As a distinctive manifestation of agency, we review Spizzo's effect. This effect arises when agents coordinate their rhythmic movements with visual pulses. Once coordination is established, agents feel controlling the onset or the offset of the pulses through their movements. Spizzo's effect, therefore, constitutes a manifest case of extended agency, in which agents are aware of controlling, through movement, the pulses temporally concomitant with movement. We propose that sense of agency requires continuity of kinesthesia, which in turn requires the continuity of selfhood. The continuity of kinesthesia is necessarily deduced from the consistent kinematics observed in movements, whereas the continuity of selfhood may stem from the patterns of rhythmic coordination that humans encounter ever since intrauterine life. The primacy of these patterns in adults is in accordance with phenomena such as Spizzo's effect, which require coordination to be induced. We, therefore, propose coordination as the fundamental interaction from which selfhood, kinesthesia, and agency arise.

Keywords: Coordination; Extended agency; Finger tapping; Kinesthesia; Selfhood; Spizzo's effect.

PubMed Disclaimer

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources