Update
Correspondence
On the immunity principle:
a view from a robot
In his excellent and thought provoking
article1 Gallagher suggests that there are
no exceptions to the immunity principle,
that one cannot use the first person
pronoun and be incorrect in one’s ref-
erence. He discusses Wittgenstein’s dif-
ferentiation between the ‘I’ as subject
and as object, and suggests that mis-
identification might be possible in the
latter instance, when one is, for instance,
viewing an arm moving and incorrectly
thinks it to be one’s own. In amplifying
this distinction Gallagher introduces the
two related aspects of (minimal) self-
awareness: a sense of agency (the sense
that I am the initiator of an act), and a
sense of ownership (the sense that it is
my body that is moving).
A few years ago we had the oppor-
tunity to use a robot at Johnson Space
Center, Houston, which allowed us to
realize just how plastic and fragile the
sense of ownership of our bodies is. The
robot’s arms have joints that move like
those of human arms, and three fingers
on each hand. The arms are viewed by
the human subject through a virtual-
reality set placed over the eyes, with the
robot cameras set in the robot’s ‘head’
so that the subject views the robot arms
from a similar viewpoint as one views
one’s own arms. No direct vision of one’s
own body is possible, while one sits
across the room from the robot. A series
of sensors are placed on one’s own arms,
which in turn control the movement of
the robot’s arms. Then when one moves,
the robot’s arms move similarly, after a
short delay.
Thus, one sees and controls the
robot’s moving arms without receiving
any peripheral feedback from them
(but having one’s own peripheral pro-
prioceptive feedback from one’s unseen
arms). In this situation, we transferred
tools from one hand to another, picked
up an egg, and tied knots. After a few
minutes we all became at ease with the
feeling of being ‘in’ the robot. Making
a movement and seeing it effected suc-
cessfully led to a strong sense of em-
bodiment within the robot arms and
body. This was manifest in one particu-
lar example when one of us thought
that he had better be careful for if he
Reply to Cole, Sacks and Waterman
Cole, Sacks and Waterman offer a fascin-
ating example of self-awareness that
raises a number of questions about
the immunity principle, and the related
senses of agency and ownership1.
Whether there are exceptions to the
immunity principle is still, I think, an
open question. With respect to the robot
example cited, there are at least two as-
dropped a wrench it would land on his
leg! Only the robot arms had been seen
and moved, but the perception was that
one’s body was in the robot. This feeling
was present both in able-bodied people
who tried the robot and in a subject, IW,
who had a large-fibre sensory neuro-
pathy that led to the loss of the sen-
sations of movement/position sense, and
light touch, below the neck2.
In this situation, one’s sense of
agency and sense of ownership of ac-
tion are intact but there is a misidenti-
fication of the sense of ownership of
one’s own body, this being transferred
into a set of steel rods and stubby ro-
botic hands with little visual similarity to
human arms. One might suggest that,
in this case, the senses of agency and
ownership of action redefine the sense
of ownership of body. That this sense is
so plastic and fragile was a surprise. It
may arise because during our lives our
bodies can alter considerably in size,
shape and motor skill. As children we
learn to impose our senses of agency,
ownership of action and of body onto a
corporeal body that grows and changes.
When we injure ourselves (our embod-
ied corporeal selves) then we have to
maintain a sense of agency and owner-
ship with the injured and altered body.
The mere act of limping, for instance,
must profoundly alter peripheral feed-
back and the programs required to
move. As we age, similar corporeal
changes must also be assimilated. If we
did not have this ability to alter our
mapping of a sense of ownership and of
agency onto altered bodies we might
be at risk of alienation from them.
Lastly, Gallagher suggests that al-
though a sense of ownership for motor
action can be explained in terms of
ecological self-awareness, the sense of
agency may be based on a process
within the brain that precedes action
and translates intention into action
(based on evidence from the elegant
work of, amongst others, Anthony
Marcel and Patrick Haggard3,4). The ex-
ample of subject IW might be relevant
here. As a result of his illness, IW was
initially completely unable to make any
controlled movement. This lasted for
pects in which I cannot make an error in
self-reference when I am moving the ro-
botic arms. First, if in this situation I say,
for example, ‘I am tying the knot’, to
whom does the ‘I’ refer? It can refer to no
one other than myself, even if I am wrong
about who is tying the knot. Indeed, if
some other person is actually working
the robotic arms and I mistakenly think
Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 4, No. 5,
several weeks. Slowly, he learnt to make
movements by conscious effort and with
visual feedback. Initially, when without
voluntary control, he had little sense of
agency and felt most disembodied.
Regaining movement control required
a redevelopment of the focus of motor
command and with this came a sense
of agency. Both, however, required per-
ipheral verification, or ‘reality testing’,
from visual feedback. Although the
sense of agency does seem to reside at
a level preceding action in control sub-
jects, one would be wary of completely
excluding a role for verification, per-
ipherally, of the success of movement.
Peripheral feedback is not sufficient for
a sense of agency (clearly passive move-
ment does not lead to it), but without
such feedback in the unperceived back-
ground (at the level of the motor
schema) the senses of agency and own-
ership of action may be altered and even
fail to be maintained.
Jonathan Cole
Centre for Neuroscience,
University of Southampton, and
Poole Hospital,
Poole, UK BH15 2JB.
tel: +44 1202 442118
fax: +44 1202 442562
e-mail: jcole@poole-tr.swest.nhs.uk
Oliver Sacks
Albert Einstein College of Medicine,
New York, NY, USA.
Ian Waterman
Access Matters Ltd, Southampton, UK.
References
1 Gallagher, S. (2000) Philosophical conceptions
of the self: implications for cognitive science.
Trends Cognit. Sci. 4, 14–21
2 Cole, J. (1995) Pride and a Daily Marathon,
MIT Press
3 Haggard, P. and Magno, E. (1999) On the
relation between brain potentials and aware-
ness of voluntary movements. Exp. Brain Res.
126, 128–133
4 Marcel, A.J. The sense of agency: awareness
and ownership of actions and intentions. In
Agency and Self-awareness (Roessler, J. and
Eilan, N., eds), Oxford University Press (in press)
that the arms are being operated by my
action, my statement (and my belief)
that ‘I am tying the knot’ would not be
incorrect unless the ‘I’ referred to myself.
If I discovered my mistake I might say
‘Oh, it is not I who am tying the knot’.
Both of these statements have their
proper meaning only if the ‘I’ refers to
myself. Second, both statements pertain
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May 2000