Date: 2007.10.04 (Thu) 14:00-15:15
Place: Kashiwa Campus, General Research Building, Room 663.
Speaker: Tomohisa Asai
Title: Schizotypy and the sense of self-agency related to motor control
Keywords: schizotypal personality traits (schizotypy), schizophrenia, sense of self-agency, motor control, forward model

Affiliation: Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
Position: Graduate Student
Disciplines: Psycho-pathology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science

Abstract:
Recently, the consciousness has been examined by neuropychological methods. Especially, the sense of agency has been focused on. The sense of agency is the sense that I am the one who generaged the action. The sense is important to understand the schizophrenia (Frith, 2005). Schizophrenic passive symptoms, including auditory hallucinations, alien controls and thought insertion, may be caused by the lack of the sense of agency. They feel they are not the origin of their actions though they generated them. The experimental studied have revealed their abnormal sense of agency. In the studies, the participants have feedbacks of their joystic movements or gestures, and they judge the origin. We showed that the university students with schizotypal personality trais, which may be the predisposition to schizophrenia, also have the abnormal sense of agecy. And now, we are examining the causes of their abnormal sense according to the forward models which can explain the action mechanisms computationally. I would like to show our experiments and discuss the human in my presentation.

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[9] Asai, T., & Tanno, Y. (2007). The relationship between the sense of self-agency and schizotypal personality traits. Journal of Motor Behavior. 39, 162-168.

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[12] Asai, T., Sugimori, E., & Tanno, Y. (in submitted). Schizotypal personality traits and prediction of one’s own movements in motor control.