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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1524904

An Integral Forward Model of Agency Experience in Thought and Action

Provisionally accepted
Oliver Lukitsch Oliver Lukitsch *
  • University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Historically, Frith's (1992) comparator model has been a seminal account of the sense of agency in thought and bodily action. According to this model, only thoughts and actions that are successfully predicted are experienced as agentive, thus providing a unified account of the sense of agency for mind and body. However, this unified model has since been rejected on the grounds that thinking and bodily action impose different constraints on the experience of agency and conscious prediction. While this is widely accepted, the predictive processing model of the sense of agency offers a new perspective that avoids previous arguments against a unified comparator model and paves the way for its reintroduction.

    Keywords: action-oriented predictive processing, integral forward modeling, precision weighting, sense of agency, sense of effort

    Received: 08 Nov 2024; Accepted: 08 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Lukitsch. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Oliver Lukitsch, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

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