Overlapping Cortical Substrate of Biomechanical Control and Subjective Agency.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience April 30, 2025 John P Veillette, Alfred F Chao, Romain Nith et al.
The sense of agency (SoA) during movement may be linked to the same neural representations that solve the biomechanical control problem. Using fMRI and a deep neural network performing the same hand-control task in simulation, the authors found detailed cortical encodings of sensorimotor states in visual areas that were best explained by inverse dynamics computations. When they manipulated SoA by electrically stimulating participants' muscles, the same voxels predicted SoA. Model-brain correspondences and robust SoA decoding were achieved within single subjects, enabling individual-level study of motor representations and awareness.