Neural precursors of decisions that matter-an ERP study of deliberate and arbitrary choice.

Uri Maoz,Christof Koch,Gideon Yaffe,Liad Mudrik

doi:10.7554/elife.39787

Abstract

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Highlights

Humans typically experience freely selecting between alternative courses of action, say, when ordering a particular item off a restaurant menu
Focusing on the last 500 ms before movement onset for our statistical tests, we found a clear readiness potential (RP) in arbitrary decisions, yet RP amplitude was not significantly different from 0 in deliberate decisions (Figure 3A; F(1,17)=11.86, p=0.003, BF = 309.21 for the main effect of decision type; in t-tests against 0 for this averaged activity in the different conditions, corrected for multiple comparisons, an effect was only found for arbitrary decisions (hard: t(17)=5.09, p=0.0001, BF = 307.38; easy: t(17) =5.75, p
Focusing again on the À0.5 to 0 s range before response onset for our statistical tests, we found a clear RP in arbitrary decisions, yet RP amplitude was not significantly different from 0 in deliberate decisions (Figure 6C; ANOVA F(1,17)=12.09, p=0.003 for the main effect of decision type; in t-tests against 0, corrected for multiple comparisons, an effect was only found for arbitrary decisions (hard: t(17) =4.13, p=0.0007; easy: t(17)=4.72, p=0.0002) and not for deliberate ones (hard: t(17)=0.38, p>0.5; easy: t(17)=1.13, p=0.27)

Summary

Introduction

Humans typically experience freely selecting between alternative courses of action, say, when ordering a particular item off a restaurant menu. A series of human studies using electroencephalography (EEG) (Haggard and Eimer, 1999; Libet et al, 1983; Salvaris and Haggard, 2014), fMRI (Bode and Haynes, 2009; Bode et al, 2011; Soon et al, 2008; Soon et al, 2013), intracranial (Perez et al, 2015), and single-cell recordings (Fried et al, 2011) challenged the veridicality of this common experience.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion