ReviewTrends in cognitive sciences2016
On the Self-Organizing Origins of Agency.
Review in Trends in cognitive sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Strange attractors: purpose, synchronicity, flow, and the neurodynamics of meaning.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Review
- Infants Display Anticipatory Gaze During a Motor Contingency Paradigm.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Artificial intelligence detects awareness of functional relation with the environment in 3 month old babies.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Meaning from movement and stillness: Signatures of coordination dynamics reveal infant agency.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Dynamical systems model of development of the action differentiation in early infancy: a requisite of physical agency.Biological cybernetics · 2023Article
- Modelling brain dynamics by Boolean networks.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The verb-self link: An implicit association test study.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- Developmental shifts in computations used to detect environmental controllability.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Mind the matter: Active matter, soft robotics, and the making of bio-inspired artificial intelligence.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2022Article
- Reciprocity and alignment: quantifying coupling in dynamic interactions.Royal Society open science · 2021Review
- The Cognitive, Ecological, and Developmental Origins of Self-Disturbance in Borderline Personality Disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
- Making the World Behave: A New Embodied Account on Mobile Paradigm.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Article
- Intentional Binding Effects in the Experience of Noticing the Regularity of a Perceptual-Motor Task.Brain sciences · 2020Article
- An Algorithmic Metaphysics of Self-Patterns.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Developing Self-Awareness in Robots via Inner Speech.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2020Article
- Coordination Dynamics: A Foundation for Understanding Social Behavior.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2020Article
- Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2019Review
- A match does not make a sense: on the sufficiency of the comparator model for explaining the sense of agency.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
The question of agency and directedness in living systems has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. What principles and mechanisms underlie the emergence of agency? Analysis and dynamical modeling of experiments on human infants suggest that the birth of agency is due to a eureka-like, pattern-forming phase transition in which the infant suddenly realizes it can make things happen in the world. The main mechanism involves positive feedback: when the baby's initially spontaneous movements cause the world to change, their perceived consequences have a sudden and sustained amplifying effect on the baby's further actions. The baby discovers itself as a causal agent. Some implications of this theory are discussed.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.