Inducing disbelief in free will alters brain correlates of preconscious motor preparation: the brain minds whether we believe in free will or not

The feeling of being in control of one's own actions is a strong subjective experience. However, discoveries in psychology and neuroscience challenge the validity of this experience and suggest that free will is just an illusion. This raises a question: What would happen if people started to disbelieve in free will? Previous research has shown that low control beliefs affect performance and motivation. Recently, it has been shown that undermining free-will beliefs influences social behavior. In the study reported here, we investigated whether undermining beliefs in free will affects brain correlates of voluntary motor preparation. Our results showed that the readiness potential was reduced in individuals induced to disbelieve in free will. This effect was evident more than 1 s before participants consciously decided to move, a finding that suggests that the manipulation influenced intentional actions at preconscious stages. Our findings indicate that abstract belief systems might have a much more fundamental effect than previously thought.     

Decision speed and choice regret: When haste feels like waste

We test a metacognitive account of why larger choice sets often lead to greater regret, proposing that people apply the lay theory that “a quick choice is a bad choice” when evaluating how well they have chosen. Because people often operate under time pressure, larger sets are likely to entail a more cursory selection process than smaller sets, generating a feeling of having rushed the evaluation of the alternatives and heightened regret. Four studies show that choice-set size does not influence participants' regret when they believe that they had enough time to choose, that the subjective feeling of being rushed accounts for greater regret when choosing from larger sets, and that changing people's lay theories about choosing quickly eliminates regret.     

Conscious intention and motor cognition

The subjective experience of conscious intention is a key component of our mental life. Philosophers studying 'conscious free will' have discussed whether conscious intentions could cause actions, but modern neuroscience rejects this idea of mind-body causation. Instead, recent findings suggest that the conscious experience of intending to act arises from preparation for action in frontal and parietal brain areas. Intentional actions also involve a strong sense of agency, a sense of controlling events in the external world. Both intention and agency result from the brain processes for predictive motor control, not merely from retrospective inference.     

Spinoza and the Feeling of Freedom

We seem to have a direct experience of our freedom when we act. Many philosophers take this feeling of freedom as evidence that we possess libertarian free will. Spinoza denies that we have free will of any sort, although he admits that we nonetheless feel free. Commentators often attribute to him what I call the ‘Negative Account’ of the feeling: it results from the fact that we are conscious of our actions but ignorant of their causes. I argue that the Negative Account is flawed. The feeling of freedom also depends on a vacillation of the mind. When the mind forms too many incompatible associations, it vacillates between them. When we act, the mind vacillates back and forth between the kinds of actions that we associate with our present mental state. We then mistake this subjective vacillation for an objective feature of ourselves—namely, the power to do otherwise.     

The Self as a Moral Agent: Preschoolers Behave Morally but Believe in the Freedom to Do Otherwise

Recent work suggests a strong connection between intuitions regarding our own free will and our moral behavior. We investigate the origins of this link by asking whether preschool-aged children construe their own moral actions as freely chosen. We gave children the option to make three moral/social choices (avoiding harm to another, following a rule, and following peer behavior) and then asked them to retrospect as to whether they were free to have done otherwise. When given the choice to act (either morally or immorally), children avoided harm and abided by rules, but they endorsed their freedom to have done otherwise. When choice was restricted by adult instruction, children did not endorse their free choice and indicated feeling constrained by moral obligation in their explanatory responses. These results suggest that children believe that their moral actions afford free will, but this belief is dependent on their experience of choice.     

The subjective effort of everyday mental tasks: Attending,assessing, and choosing

Why are some mental tasks experienced as more effortful than others? Answers to this question about subjective effort have begun to be addressed by researchers investigating why some mental tasks are associated with more ‘elbow grease’ or ‘depletion’ than other tasks. It has been proposed that tasks such as sustained attention should be accompanied by more subjective effort than other tasks, such as assessing (e.g., counting a handful of items) or choosing randomly between two alternatives. In general, these proposals coincide with people’s intuitions regarding how effort should vary by mental task. However, little laboratory data have corroborated these conclusions. In two studies, we cataloged the relative amount of subjective effort associated with some basic and ubiquitous mental activities: attending (most subjective effort), assessing, and choosing (least subjective effort). Results support hypotheses about subjective effort. Because subjective effort is perceived to be experienced by a subject, we explored also the relationship between effort and the involvement of the ‘psychological self.’     

Dissociable neural systems support retrieval of how and why action knowledge

In everyday discourse, people typically represent actions in one of two ways: how they are performed or why they are performed. In the present study, we determined the neural systems that support these natural modes of representing actions. Participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while identifying how and why people perform various familiar actions. Identifying how actions are performed produced activity in premotor areas that support the execution of actions and in higher-order visual areas that support the perception of action-related objects; this finding supports an embodied view of action knowledge. However, identifying why actions are performed preferentially engaged areas of the brain associated with representing and reasoning about mental states; these areas were right temporoparietal junction, precuneus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and posterior superior temporal sulcus. Our results suggest that why action knowledge is not sufficiently constituted by information in motor and visual systems, but requires a system for representing states of mind, which do not have reliable motor correlates or visual appearance.     

MONITORING CONSCIOUS RECOLLECTION VIA THE ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY OF THE BRAIN

Abstract— Although another person's experience of recollection cannot be observed directly, we have found that the underlying operations can be monitored using noninvasive electrophysiological techniques. Results from two experiments showed that brain potentials elicited 500 to 900 ms after the onset of visually presented words vary systematically in amplitude with manipulations that influence the extent to which subjects engage in recollective processing. These brain potentials can thus be construed as correlates of the subjective experience of recollection     

Client Suicide: What Now?

The loss of a client to suicide is a painful personal and professional experience for mental health providers. Whether trainee or experienced professional, the affected clinician often reports feeling overwhelmed and unprepared for the experience of client suicide, together with significant emotional distress and diminished work performance. In this article, we present a brief overview of the literature on the impact of client suicide and ideas for coping with the psychological and professional issues that typically arise. We also provide suggestions for managing the associated practical and administrative tasks, as well as resources for obtaining professional support and guidance in the wake of this tragic event.     

The self as phenotype

Self-awareness is viewed here as the phenotypic expression of an interaction between genes and the environment. Brain and behavioral development of fetuses and newborn infants are a rich source of information regarding what might constitute minimal self-awareness. Research indicates that newborns have feeling (subjective) experience. Unlike automata, they do not just sense and respond to proximal stimulations. In light of the explosive brain growth that takes place inside and outside of the womb, first signs of feeling as opposed to sensing experience are discussed. Feeling experience is considered as the necessary condition for having minimal self-awareness. Both would co-emerge in development. However, minimal self-awareness is rapidly supplemented with an awareness that is not just perceptual, but also conceptual and ethical, primarily defined in relation to and by others.     

Being a self: considerations from functional imaging

Having a self is associated with important advantages for an organism.These advantages have been suggested to include mechanisms supporting elaborate capacities for planning, decision-making, and behavioral control. Acknowledging such functionality offers possibilities for obtaining traction on investigation of neural correlates of self-hood. A method that has potential for investigating some of the brain-based properties of self arising in behavioral contexts varying in requirements for such behavioral guidance and control is functional brain imaging. Data obtained with this method are beginning to converge on a set of brain areas that appear to play a significant role in permitting conscious access to representational content having reference to self as an embodied and independent experiencer and agent. These areas have been identified in a variety of imaging contexts ranging from passive state conditions in which they appear to manifest ongoing activity associated with spontaneous and typically 'self-related' cognition, to tasks targeting explicitly experienced properties of self, to demanding task conditions where activity within them is attenuated in apparent redirection of cognitive resources in the service of task guidance and control. In this paper, these data will be reviewed and a hypothesis presented regarding a significant role for these areas in enabling degrees of self-awareness and participating in the management of such behavioral control.     

The feeling of fluent perception: a single experience from multiple asynchronous sources

Zeki and co-workers recently proposed that perception can best be described as locally distributed, asynchronous processes that each create a kind of microconsciousness, which condense into an experienced percept. The present article is aimed at extending this theory to metacognitive feelings. We present evidence that perceptual fluency-the subjective feeling of ease during perceptual processing-is based on speed of processing at different stages of the perceptual process. Specifically, detection of briefly presented stimuli was influenced by figure-ground contrast, but not by symmetry (Experiment 1) or the font (Experiment 2) of the stimuli. Conversely, discrimination of these stimuli was influenced by whether they were symmetric (Experiment 1) and by the font they were presented in (Experiment 2), but not by figure-ground contrast. Both tasks however were related with the subjective experience of fluency (Experiments 1 and 2). We conclude that subjective fluency is the conscious phenomenal correlate of different processing stages in visual perception.     

“I remember/know/guess that I knew it all along!”: Subjective experience versus objective measures of the knew-it-all-along effect

The knew-it-all-along (KIA) effect occurs when individuals report that they previously knew something that they learned only recently. People often err when reporting the level of knowledge they had prior to feedback, but there is no research exploring the subjective experience of this effect. We incorporated a remember/just know/ guess judgment into a traditional (Experiment 1A: rating scale) and a modified-traditional (Experiment 1B: two-alternative forced choice) KIA procedure. Experiments 2A, 2B, and 3 were similar in format to Experiments 1A and 1B, but the trivia stimuli were replaced with word puzzles, which were expected to be better suited to inducing a feeling of having known it all along, because answers to trivia questions typically seem arbitrary, whereas word puzzles often give rise to ah-ha experiences. A KIA effect was observed in all the experiments, but an accompanying subjectivefeeling of having known it all along arose only with word puzzles.     

Simulated thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using deception and magic

In order to study the feeling of control over decisions, we told 60 participants that a neuroimaging machine could read and influence their thoughts. While inside a mock brain scanner, participants chose arbitrary numbers in two similar tasks. In the Mind-Reading Task, the scanner appeared to guess the participants’ numbers; in the Mind-Influencing Task, it appeared to influence their choice of numbers. We predicted that participants would feel less voluntary control over their decisions when they believed that the scanner was influencing their choices. As predicted, participants felt less control and made slower decisions in the Mind-Influencing Task compared to the Mind-Reading Task. A second study replicated these findings. Participants’ experience of the ostensible influence varied, with some reporting an unknown source directing them towards specific numbers. This simulated thought insertion paradigm can therefore influence feelings of voluntary control and may help model symptoms of mental disorders.     

Perceptual awareness and its loss in unilateral neglect and extinction

We review recent evidence from studies of patients with unilateral neglect and/or extinction, who suffer from a loss of awareness for stimuli towards the affected side of space. We contrast their deficit with the effects of damage to primary sensory areas, noting that such areas can remain structurally intact in neglect, with lesions typically centred on the right inferior parietal lobe. In keeping with preservation of initial sensory pathways, many recent studies have shown that considerable residual processing can still take place for neglected or extinguished stimuli, yet without reaching the patient's awareness. This ranges from preserved visual grouping processes through to activation of identity, semantics and emotional significance. Similarly to 'preattentive' processing in normals, such residual processing can modulate what will enter the patient's awareness. Recent studies have used measures such as ERPs and fMRI to determine the neural correlates of conscious versus unconscious perception in the patients, which in turn can be related to the anatomy of their lesions. We relate the patient findings to neurophysiological data from areas in the monkey parietal lobe, which indicate that these serve as cross-modal and sensorimotor interfaces highlighting currently relevant locations as targets for intentional action. We speculate on the special role such brain regions may play in perceptual awareness, seeking to explain how damage to a system which appears primarily to code space could eliminate awareness even for non-spatial stimulus properties at affected locations. This may relate to the extreme nature of 'winner-takes-all' functions within the parietal lobe, and their correspondingly strong influence on other brain areas.     

Rethinking value elicitation for personal consequential decisions

The application of multiattribute decision analysis to personal consequential decision problems can be unhelpful particularly where the analysis fails to help the decision maker to discover new values, or where the decision maker is unable to visualize the experience that may result from choosing a particular course of action. We concur with James March that values are best discovered by the act of choosing and experimenting but acknowledge that the act of choice can lead to irreversible consequences. Both of these problems suggest that techniques which assist the decision maker to envisage the consequences of choice need to be developed and incorporated into the modelling process. We suggest some forms that these techniques might take. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perception of suffering and compassion experience: brain gender disparities

Compassion is considered a moral emotion related to the perception of suffering in others, and resulting in a motivation to alleviate the afflicted party. We compared brain correlates of compassion-evoking images in women and men. BOLD functional images of 24 healthy volunteers (twelve women and twelve men; age=27±2.5 y.o.) were acquired in a 3T magnetic resonance scanner while subjects viewed pictures of human suffering previously verified to elicit compassion and indicated their compassionate experience by finger movements. Functional analysis revealed that while women manifested activation in areas involved in basic emotional, empathic, and moral processes, such as basal regions and cingulate and frontal cortices, activation in men was restricted mainly to the occipital cortex and parahippocampal gyrus. These findings suggest that compassion and its moral elements constitute gender-relative subjective phenomena emerging from differently evolved neural mechanisms and socially learned features possibly related to nurturing skills.     

Achievement orientations from subjective histories of success: Promotion pride versus prevention pride

A new task goal elicits a feeling of pride in individuals with a subjective history of success, and this achievment pride produces anticipatory goal reactions that energize and direct behavior to approach the task goal. By distinguishing between promotion pride and prevention pride, the present paper extends this classic model of achievement motivation. Regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997 ) distinguishes between a promotion focus on hopes and accomplishments (gains) and a prevention focus on safety and responsibilities (non‐losses). We propose that a subjective history of success with promotion‐related eagerness (promotion pride) orients individuals toward using eagerness means to approach a new task goal, whereas a subjective history of success with prevention‐related vigilance (prevention pride) orients individuals toward using vigilance means to approach a new task goal. Studies 1–3 tested this proposal by examining the relations between a new measure of participants' subjective histories of promotion success and prevention success (the Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (RFQ)) and their achievement strategies in different tasks. Study 4 examined the relation between participants' RFQ responses and their reported frequency of feeling eager or vigilant in past task engagements. Study 5 used an experimental priming technique to make participants temporarily experience either a subjective history of promotion success or a subjective history of prevention success. For both chronic and situationally induced achievement pride, these studies found that when approaching task goals individuals with promotion pride use eagerness means whereas individuals with prevention pride use vigilance means. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

预期如何影响人们对不愉快事件的体验?

本研究以味觉和痛觉两种感觉通道的体验为对象,探讨预期效价和预期信心如何影响知觉体验的结果及其作用机制。通过基于味觉和痛觉的两个实验,发现预期会影响即时知觉体验,并且预期信心在其中起到调节作用——对预期充满信心时,即时体验和对结果的预期保持一致,预期越积极即时体验越好,预期越消极即时体验越差;而对预期缺乏信心时,即时体验和预期之间呈现背离趋势,预期越积极即时体验越差,预期越消极即时体验则越好。研究结果阐明了预期影响即时体验的机制,对我们理解身心关系也具有重要的理论意义。