Understanding Body Ownership and Agency: Understanding how people recognize and control their own bodies could help researchers develop therapies for those who’ve lost their sense of self.

Instead of investigating ownership and agency as two distinct concepts, recent research has sought to understand how body ownership might have developed through the sum of agency experiences that we accrue throughout our life. What we perceive as our body is not only what looks like our body, but what we typically have conscious control over. This control is asserted by learned associations between our muscular movements and the sensory feedback we perceive when performing an action—the so-called “action effects.” What remains unclear, however, is just how multiple selves—including our bodily, social, and autobiographical selves—are integrated, and what kind of agency experiences drive the perception of having a single, stable self.