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Strange bedfellows: sense of agency and metacognition in dreams

Talk by Melanie Rosen, IMC

Info about event

Time

Tuesday 9 April 2019,  at 11:00 - 13:00

Location

IMC Meeting Room, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4, Building 1483-312

Organizer

AMP

Abstract

 

Due to the broad variety of alterations to cognition during dreams, dreaming has the potential to provide an informative testcase for the relationship between these features. Here I analyse the complex relationship between metacognition and the sense of agency, and how these features alter in ways that can be surprising given the common assumptions about dreams. It is often argued that cognitive capacity is severely diminished in sleep, evidenced by the lack of reflection, rational capacity, memory and metacognition apparent from dream reports. Dreamers often show a reduced ability to monitor and control their own thoughts and actions, their experiences and decisions appear delusion and they are unable to even realise when a dream is fantastical and bizarre, passing the experience off as normal. However, while bizarreness and reduced cognitive abilities are common dream features, more nuance is required to fully describe dream experience.

One of the cognitive features of dreams that is most commonly reported as diminished or even absent is metacognition, the ability to reflect on our own cognitive functions. However, although common, this should not be taken as a necessary feature. Dreams can in fact be highly metacognitive, lucid dreaming, in which the dreamer realises they are dreaming, being a clear example. A pluralist view of cognition in sleep, accounting for this variety, is the most fruitful approach.

The relationship between metacognition and the sense of agency (SoA) is also complex. SoA refers to the feeling of control over our bodily movements and thoughts. Metacognition might be necessary to make conscious judgments of agency, but it is less clear how it relates to feelings of agency as they are described under the comparator model. According to this model, intentions and predictions of the consequences of motor commands are compared with attenuated sensory feedback in order to establish whether the intentions are successfully achieved.  Reports of striving, predicting, achieving goals and especially thwarted intentions during dreams are consistent with this model. However, it is difficult to conceive of how this can describe the dream experience, since the comparator model of waking SoA relies on sensory feedback from the body. In dreams, of course, there is little or no such feedback, at least from the physical body. In contrast, regarding this lack of feedback, it seems more plausible to account for dream SoA using a narrator model, according to which a reflective process associates intentions and outcomes with self-conceptions and makes inferences, perhaps SoA is even assigned after waking. However, this narrator approach is seen as an explanation for judgments of agency, rather than the feelings of agency described by the comparator model. And since JoA’s may require metacognition, reduced metacognition in dreams makes the regular occurrence of such experiences less likely, unless SoA only occurs after waking, which I argue against. This presentation with analyse how, under the pluralistic approach to dream content, the complex interplay between these cognitive features revealed in dream reports can expand our understanding of human cognition.

 

Contact

Melanie Rosen, Postdoc, Interacting Minds Centre