The capacity for voluntary action is seen as essential to human nature. Yet neuroscience and behaviourist psychology have traditionally dismissed the topic as unscientific, perhaps because the ...mechanisms that cause actions have long been unclear. However, new research has identified networks of brain areas, including the pre-supplementary motor area, the anterior prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex, that underlie voluntary action. These areas generate information for forthcoming actions, and also cause the distinctive conscious experience of intending to act and then controlling one's own actions. Volition consists of a series of decisions regarding whether to act, what action to perform and when to perform it. Neuroscientific accounts of voluntary action may inform debates about the nature of individual responsibility.
Volition refers to a capacity for endogenous action, particularly goal-directed endogenous action, shared by humans and some other animals. It has long been controversial whether a specific set of ...cognitive processes for volition exist in the human brain, and much scientific thinking on the topic continues to revolve around traditional metaphysical debates about free will. At its origins, scientific psychology had a strong engagement with volition. This was followed by a period of disenchantment, or even outright hostility, during the second half of the twentieth century. In this review, I aim to reinvigorate the scientific approach to volition by, first, proposing a range of different features that constitute a new, neurocognitively realistic working definition of volition. I then focus on three core features of human volition: its generativity (the capacity to trigger actions), its subjectivity (the conscious experiences associated with initiating voluntary actions), and its teleology (the goal-directed quality of some voluntary actions). I conclude that volition is a neurocognitive process of enormous societal importance and susceptible to scientific investigation.
Sense of agency (SoA) refers to the feeling that one’s voluntary actions produce external sensory events 1, 2. Several psychological theories hypothesized links between SoA and affective evaluation ...3–6. For example, people tend to attribute positive outcomes to their own actions, perhaps reflecting high-level narrative processes that enhance self-esteem 3. Here we provide the first evidence that such emotional modulations also involve changes in the low-level sensorimotor basis of agency. The intentional binding paradigm 1 was used to quantify the subjective temporal compression between a voluntary action and its sensory consequences, providing an implicit measure of SoA. Emotional valence of action outcomes was manipulated by following participants’ key-press actions with negative or positive emotional vocalizations 7, or neutral sounds. We found that intentional binding was reduced for negative compared to positive or neutral outcomes. Discriminant analyses identified a change in time perception of both actions and their negative outcomes, demonstrating that the experience of action itself is subject to affective modulation. A small binding benefit was also found for positive action outcomes. Emotional modulation of SoA may contribute to regulating social behavior. Correctly tracking the valenced effects of one’s voluntary actions on other people could underlie successful social interactions.
•Sense of agency (SoA) can be modulated by emotional valence of action outcomes•SoA was quantified by subjective temporal compression between actions and outcomes•SoA was attenuated for negative outcomes, relative to neutral and positive outcomes•Negative valence changed the time of the preceding action, as well as the outcome
In adult life, people normally know what they are doing. This experience of controlling one's own actions and, through them, the course of events in the outside world is called 'sense of agency'. It ...forms a central feature of human experience; however, the brain mechanisms that produce the sense of agency have only recently begun to be investigated systematically. This recent progress has been driven by the development of better measures of the experience of agency, improved design of cognitive and behavioural experiments, and a growing understanding of the brain circuits that generate this distinctive but elusive experience. The sense of agency is a mental and neural state of cardinal importance in human civilization, because it is frequently altered in psychopathology and because it underpins the concept of responsibility in human societies.
The feeling of control is a fundamental aspect of human experience and accompanies our voluntary actions all the time. However, how the sense of control interacts with wider perception, cognition, ...and behavior remains poorly understood. This study focused on how controlling an external object influences the allocation of attention. Experiment 1 examined attention to an object that is under a different level of control from the others. Participants searched for a target among multiple distractors on screen. All the distractors were partially under the participant's control (50% control level), and the search target was either under more or less control than the distractors. The results showed that, against this background of partial control, visual attention was attracted to an object only if it was more controlled than other available objects and not if it was less controlled. Experiment 2 examined attention allocation in contexts of either perfect control or no control over most of the objects. Specifically, the distractors were under either perfect (100%) control or no (0%) control, and the search target had one of six levels of control varying from 0% to 100%. When differences in control between the distractors and the target were small, visual attention was now more strongly drawn to search targets that were less controlled than distractors, rather than more controlled, suggesting attention to objects over which one might be losing control. Experiment 3 studied the events of losing or gaining control as opposed to the states of having or not having control. ERP measures showed that P300 amplitude proportionally encoded the magnitude of both increases and decreases in degree of control. However, losing control had more marked effects on P170 and P300 than gaining an equivalent degree of control, indicating high priority for efficiently detecting failures of control. Overall, our results suggest that controlled objects preferentially attract attention in uncontrolled environments. However, once control has been registered, the brain becomes highly sensitive to subsequent loss of control. Our findings point toward careful perceptual monitoring of degree of one's own agentic control over external objects. We suggest that control has intrinsic cognitive value because perceptual systems are organized to detect it and, once it has been acquired, to maintain it.
The sense of agency refers to the subjective feeling of controlling one’s own actions, and through them, events in the outside world. According to computational motor control models, the prediction ...errors from comparison between the predicted sensory feedback and actual sensory feedback determine whether people feel agency over the corresponding outcome event, or not. This mechanism requires a model of the relation between action and outcome. However, in a novel environment, where this model has not yet been learned, the sense of agency must emerge during exploratory behaviours. In the present study, we designed a novel control detection task, in which participants explored the extent to which they could control the movement of three dots with a computer mouse, and then identified the dot that they felt they could control. Pre-recorded motions were applied for two dots, and the participants’ real-time motion only influenced one dot’s motion (i.e. the target dot). We disturbed participants’ control over the motion of the target dot in one of two ways. In one case, we applied a fixed angular bias transformation between participant’s movements and dot movements. In another condition, we mixed the participant’s current movement with replay of another movement, and used the resulting hybrid signal to drive visual dot position. The former intervention changes the match between motor action and visual outcome, but maintains a regular relation between the two. In contrast, the latter alters both matching and motor-visual correlation. Crucially, we carefully selected the strength of these two perturbations so that they caused the same magnitude of impairment of motor performance in a simple reaching task, suggesting that both interventions produced comparable prediction errors. However, we found the visuomotor transformation had much less effect on the ability to detect which dot was under one’s own control than did the nonlinear disturbance. This suggests a specific role of a correlation-like mechanism that detects ongoing visual-motor regularity in the human sense of agency. These regularity-detection mechanisms would remain intact under the linear, but not the nonlinear transformation. Human sense of agency may depend on monitoring ongoing motor-visual regularities, as well as on detecting prediction errors.
Sense of agency (SoA), a feeling that one's voluntary actions produce events in the external world, is a key factor behind every goal-directed human behaviour. Recent studies have demonstrated that ...SoA is reduced when one's voluntary action causes negative outcomes, compared to when it causes positive outcomes. It is yet unclear whether this emotional modulation of SoA is caused by predicting the outcome valence (prediction hypothesis) or by retrospectively interpreting the outcome (postdiction hypothesis). To address this, we emulated a social situation where one's voluntary action was followed by either another's negative emotional vocalisation or positive emotional vocalisation. Crucially, the relation between an action and the emotional valence of its outcome was predictable in some blocks of trials, but unpredictable in other blocks. Quantitative, implicit measures of SoA based on the intentional binding effect supported the prediction hypothesis. Our findings imply that the social-emotional modulation of SoA is based on predicting the emotional valence of action outcomes.
Knowing the body's location in external space is a fundamental perceptual task. Perceiving the location of body parts through proprioception requires that information about the angles of each joint ...(i.e., body posture) be combined with information about the size and shape of the body segments between joints. Although information about body posture is specified by on-line afferent signals, no sensory signals are directly informative about body size and shape. Thus, human position sense must refer to a stored body model of the body's metric properties, such as body part size and shape. The need for such a model has long been recognized; however, the properties of this model have never been systematically investigated. We developed a technique to isolate and measure this body model. Participants judged the location in external space of 10 landmarks on the hand. By analyzing the internal configuration of the locations of these points, we produced implicit maps of the mental representation of hand size and shape. We show that this part of the body model is massively distorted, in a reliable and characteristic fashion, featuring shortened fingers and broadened hands. Intriguingly, these distortions appear to retain several characteristics of primary somatosensory representations, such as the Penfield homunculus.
Sources of Human Volition Haggard, Patrick
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
05/2009, Letnik:
324, Številka:
5928
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Two regions of the brain contribute to the conscious experience of carrying out an action.
The sense of agency refers to the feeling that we are in control of our actions and, through them, of events in the outside world. Much research has focused on the importance of retrospectively ...matching predicted and actual action outcomes for a strong sense of agency. Yet, recent studies have revealed that a metacognitive signal about the fluency of action selection can prospectively inform our sense of agency. Fluent, or easy, action selection leads to a stronger sense of agency over action outcomes than dysfluent, or difficult, selection. Since these studies used subliminal priming to manipulate action selection, it remained unclear whether supraliminal stimuli affecting action selection would have similar effects.
We used supraliminal flankers to manipulate action selection in response to a central target. Experiment 1 revealed that conflict in action selection, induced by incongruent flankers and targets, led to reduced agency ratings over an outcome that followed the participant's response, relative to neutral and congruent flanking conditions. Experiment 2 replicated this result, and extended it to free choice between alternative actions. Finally, Experiment 3 varied the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between flankers and target. Action selection performance varied with SOA. Agency ratings were always lower in incongruent than congruent trials, and this effect did not vary across SOAs. Sense of agency is influenced by a signal that tracks conflict in action selection, regardless of the visibility of stimuli inducing conflict, and even when the timing of the stimuli means that the conflict may not affect performance.
•The Eriksen flanker task was used to manipulate action selection.•Presenting flankers long before targets abolished performance costs of conflict.•Conflict reduced sense of agency over action outcomes.•This effect was present even when performance was not affected.•Selection conflict induced by supraliminal stimuli can reduce agency.
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