"Agency as Prediction: A Cortico-Subcortical Framework"

Agency refers to the experience and attribution of control over one's own actions and their consequences. However, the brain's solution to agency has so far not been discovered. Intentional binding, long considered an implicit measure of agency, does not primarily reflect the binding of a voluntary action and its sensory outcome. Instead, emerging evidence suggests that it arises from multisensory integration of causally related events. Moreover, attempts to localize the neural basis of agency have not yielded consistent results. We propose that the key explaining agency lies in predictive mechanisms of basic motor-outcome and event learning fundamental to brain function and outline a subcortical network centered on the intralaminar thalamic nuclei and their projections to the basal ganglia and associated cortical regions. This framework provides a biologically grounded account of a gated predictive selection mechanism that may constitute low-level processes underlying higher-level attributions of agency.