A recent TMS study using intentional

binding as an implicit measure of agency also suggests a contribution of the supplementary motor complex (Moore et al., 2010). But that study was designed Alectinib in vivo to test whether candidate areas were necessary for intentional binding, and could not draw strong anatomical conclusions about the precise location of the neural correlates of implicit agency. Indeed, the repetitive stimulation protocol used in such studies may have rather widespread effects in the stimulated region of cortex (Mochizuki et al., 2005), and can also produce remote effects via neural connections with the stimulated region (Stefan et al., 2008). A recent meta-analysis of studies on the neural correlates of agency as

identified in neuroimaging data has implicated the importance of parietal brain regions such as angular gyrus, TPJ and pre-SMA, but also found an association between agency and activation of the insula, dorsofrontomedian cortex and precuneus (Sperduti et al., 2011). However, this meta-analysis did not focus on low-level implicit markers of sense of agency. We therefore aimed to identify brain regions associated with the implicit sense of agency, taking intentional binding as a proxy for sense of agency. We used an interval estimation task, in which participants judged the time between a button press and a resulting tone. In one condition this tone was elicited by the participant’s active button press, in another condition the tone was U0126 purchase elicited by a passive movement of the same finger (cf. Engbert et al., 2007). In order to extract brain areas associated with the intentional binding effect we used a parametric Phosphatidylinositol diacylglycerol-lyase approach in which we modulated each trial with its respective judgement error. Thus, trials with strong

binding effects would have large and negative values for this regressor, since underestimation of an action–effect interval corresponds to a negative judgement error. The parametric regressor in the passive condition of the interval estimation task is assumed to capture all brain activation responsible for non-specific causes of variation in time estimation, such as arousal, division of attention etc. The parametric regressor for the active condition on the other hand was assumed to identify both these non-specific factors, and additionally the agency-related changes in time perception due to intentional binding. Contrasting these two parametrically modulated conditions – one that shows the attraction of voluntary action and tone, and one that does not – offers the possibility to extract brain regions that are related to intentional binding. We used this technique to investigate the specific contributions of the SMA and the angular gyrus to sense of agency, given that these areas were repeatedly reported in previous studies of agency. Seventeen healthy students (five males; age: mean = 22.