Introspecting a conscious decision or the consciousness of a decision?

Abstract

Introspection is a highly elusive, and thus recurrently debated, topic in consciousness studies. On one hand introspection can be meant as the direct account of what happens in one’s mind. On the other hand it is argued that what is reported through introspection is not a reliable description of what occurred in one’s mind but it is a reconstruction, often invalidated by beliefs and inferences about how the mind works. Indeed introspection may be both things. It depends on what and how the subject is asked to introspect. Thus, the thorough analysis of the setting and of the instructions given to the participants is crucial to highlight what is actually investigated in the experiments. Little changes in the experimental conditions and in the wording can in fact alter deeply the introspective act. Let us consider the setting devised by Guggisberg, Dalal, Schnider, and Nagarajan (2011). Participants knew that, in the free choice condition (the most relevant to the aims of the study), they had to choose to move either the right or left finger approximately the same number of times. So, (1) they had to keep in mind at least a part of the sequence of their previous choices in order to check whether they were not privileging a finger over the other. Then they had (2a) to decide which finger they would move and, concurrently, (2b) look at the clock and (2c) detect the position of the clock hand when they decided to move the finger. They had (3) to memorize the position of the clock hand. Afterword, they had (4) to decide to move the finger and (5) operate accordingly. The core of this process is the second phase. It is worth noting that during such a phase three acts have to be performed simultaneously by the participant. Moreover, such a phase may be affected by the need to activate the memory of the previous choices (phase 1) and to remind what has to be performed successively (phase 3). Each act can have its own cerebral counterpart. For instance, it has been showed recently that clock monitoring (phase 2b) in a Libet-like experiment is associated to a distinct EEG activity in the brain (Miller, Shepherdson, & Trevena, 2011). Guggisberg et al. argued that also the introspective act in itself has a specific neural counterpart. Even though Guggisberg et al.’s study shows apparent similarities with other Libet-like experiments, it is deeply different. Firstly, contrary to usual experiments, the cerebral counterpart identified by the authors is not intended to correspond to one of the phases of the decision process but rather to an act (introspection) which covers all the central phases. In Guggisberg et al.’s experiment participants were asked to identify when they ‘‘decided which finger to move’’. In order to identify such a moment participants had to be aware that they had made the choice. Presumably the choice was preceded by a sort of planning or pre-programming process (even though participants were asked to avoid predefined response patterns; however, the procedure fails to ensure that participants were prevented to do so: for instance, they might have thought to move the right finger the next time the phoneme corresponding to the free choice condition would appear), but in this case it is irrelevant if such process was conscious or unconscious since the focus was on the awareness of having decided but not on the alleged precursors of the decision. This sweeps away the criticisms usually addressed to the experiments aimed at showing that an unconscious mechanism preceded the awareness of the decision. The second difference concerns the fact that the kind of introspection investigated by Guggisberg et al. implies a lowerorder level of consciousness than introspection investigated by other Libet-like experiments where participants were asked to report, for instance, ‘‘when they made the conscious decision which finger to move’’ (Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008). The difference is subtle but important since two different kinds of introspection are underlying. Conscious decision and con-