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Full-Text Articles in Other Psychiatry and Psychology
Volition And Action In The Human Brain: Processes, Pathologies, And Reasons, Itzhak Fried, Patrick Haggard, Biyu J. He, Aaron Schurger
Volition And Action In The Human Brain: Processes, Pathologies, And Reasons, Itzhak Fried, Patrick Haggard, Biyu J. He, Aaron Schurger
Psychology Faculty Articles and Research
Humans seem to decide for themselves what to do, and when to do it. This distinctive capacity may emerge from an ability, shared with other animals, to make decisions for action that are related to future goals, or at least free from the constraints of immediate environmental inputs. Studying such volitional acts proves a major challenge for neuroscience. This review highlights key mechanisms in the generation of voluntary, as opposed to stimulus-driven actions, and highlights three issues. The first part focuses on the apparent spontaneity of voluntary action. The second part focuses on one of the most distinctive, but elusive, …
Precursor Processes Of Human Self-Initiated Action, Nima Khalighinejad, Aaron Schurger, Andrea Desantis, Leor Zmigrod
Precursor Processes Of Human Self-Initiated Action, Nima Khalighinejad, Aaron Schurger, Andrea Desantis, Leor Zmigrod
Psychology Faculty Articles and Research
A gradual buildup of electrical potential over motor areas precedes self-initiated movements. Recently, such “readiness potentials” (RPs) were attributed to stochastic fluctuations in neural activity. We developed a new experimental paradigm that operationalized self-initiated actions as endogenous ‘skip’ responses while waiting for target stimuli in a perceptual decision task. We compared these to a block of trials where participants could not choose when to skip, but were instead instructed to skip. Frequency and timing of motor action were therefore balanced across blocks, so that conditions differed only in how the timing of skip decisions was generated. We reasoned that across-trial …