Placing willed attention in context: a review of attention and free will

Abstract

Attention is the ability to focus one's awareness on relevant events and objects while ignoring distracting ones. Laboratory studies of top-down voluntary attention commonly use predictive or instructional cues to direct attention. However, in real world scenarios, voluntary attention is not necessarily externally cued, but may be focused by internal, self-generated processes. The voluntary focusing of attention in the absence of external guidance has been referred to as “willed attention,” a term borrowed from the literature on willed motor actions. In a fashion similar to studies of willed (self-initiated) actions, during willed attention, participants are given the freedom to deploy attention based on their own free choices. Electrophysiological studies have shown that during willed attention, ongoing neural activity biases willed attention decisions on a moment-to-moment basis as reflected in transient patterns of brain electrical activity that predict where participants will later choose to focus their attention. Brain imaging studies have revealed that compared to cued attention, willed attention involves additional frontal cortical structures, which interact with the classic attentional control networks of the human brain to produce a modified network organization for willed attention control. In this introduction to willed attention, we briefly review the fields of voluntary attention and self-initiated motor actions, in order to describe willed attention and its neural correlates as they relate to the broader concepts of attention and volition.