Papers
11
Total Citations
322
H-Index
7
About
Patrick Haggard is a leading cognitive neuroscientist whose research sits at the intersection of voluntary action, bodily self-awareness, and sensorimotor perception. Based at University College London, Haggard has made foundational contributions to our understanding of human agency — the subjective sense that we are the authors of our own actions and their consequences. His influential 2015 paper on human agency and embodiment (175 citations) established key theoretical frameworks connecting how the body shapes our experience of control, while subsequent work explored whether the sense of agency arises from action-outcome associations or from real-time tracking of the control process itself. Haggard has also broken new ground in social dimensions of agency, investigating how our experience of control is shaped by social context and transmitted between individuals. His more recent investigations probe the sensorimotor foundations of spatial self-perception, examining how touch, proprioception, and motor signals — including during self-touch — construct our awareness of the body in space. Work on bodily illusions like the rubber hand illusion further demonstrates how fragile yet recoverable self-perception can be. Across these domains, Haggard's research illuminates what it fundamentally means to inhabit and consciously control a human body.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1The relationship between human agency and embodiment175 citations · 2015
- 2Evidence for metacognitive bias in perception of voluntary action45 citations · 2019
- 3The Sense of Agency as Tracking Control37 citations · 2016
- 4Social Transmission of Experience of Agency: An Experimental Study21 citations · 2016
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- 9Evidence for metacognitive bias in perception of voluntary action6 citations · 2018
- 10Interhemispheric communication during haptic self-perception2 citations · 2022