Evaluating the Case for the Low-Level Approach to Agentive Awareness

Agentive awareness is the awareness one has of oneself as acting, or as performing a particular action. Theorists distinguish between high-level (e.g., Wegner 2002 ), low-level (e.g., Frith 2007), and integrative approaches (e.g., Pacherie 2008) to explaining this brand of subjective awareness. In this paper, I evaluate the commitment of both low-level and integrative approaches to the claim that the representations involved in sensorimotor control, specifically as described by the comparator model (e.g., Frith 1992), contribute in some significant way to agentive awareness. I examine the main empirical data offered in support of this claim and argue that it does not succeed in establishing a role for sensorimotor states in generating agentive awareness. This helps clear the way for high-level approaches to explaining this phenomenon.