Computing our sense of control

Talk by Daniel Yon, Birkbeck, University of London, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow, as part of the seminar series of the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center - CNRS / Université Paris Cité.

Presentation

Human beings are agents, and through our actions we can shape the world around us. But to interact with our surroundings, agents like us need to discover the causal structure of the environments we inhabit – learning what we can and cannot control.

This sense of control is a key part of our normal mental life, and disruptions in this sense are characteristic of numerous psychiatric illnesses – including psychosis and depression. But it has been difficult so far for psychologists and neuroscientists to characterise the computations our brains actually perform to construct feelings of agency, and how those computations might go awry.

In this talk, he will describe a new approach he has developed in the lab for measuring and modelling the sense of control – inspired by psychophysical tools and techniques from perceptual decision making. This approach offers a new perspective on ‘illusions of control’, reveals how communicating with other people influences our perception of our own agency and suggests new connections between the sense of agency and psychiatric symptoms across a range of diagnoses. Thus, this approach may get us closer to characterising the computations performed in the mind and brain as we try to infer what lays within and beyond our personal sphere of control.

More information
Registration: louise.kirsch@parisdescartes.fr