Abstract
The traditional research approach in cognitive neuroscience uses passive participants who keep still and wait for stimuli presented by the experimenter. Although this monitoring or vigilance paradigm has effectively revealed various aspects of cognitive processes, it does not cover the full range of human cognitive activity. The present article introduces a new experimental paradigm to examine another mode of stimulus information processing in which participants process stimuli produced by their voluntary actions. Three event-related brain potential experiments using oddball tasks showed consistently that a fronto-central P3 (P3a) component was larger in amplitude when the eliciting stimulus was triggered by a voluntary button press than when the same stimulus was presented automatically. This effect was obtained in both auditory and visual modalities. The findings suggest that voluntary stimulus presentation boosts the process of attention switching to deviant events, possibly because the planning of action activates the representation of its most frequent perceivable outcome.
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