Musical expertise affects the sense of agency: Intentional binding in expert pianists

Libet's legacy: A primer to the neuroscience of volition

The neuroscience of volition is an emerging subfield of the brain sciences, with hundreds of papers on the role of consciousness in action formation published each year. This makes the state-of-the-art in the discipline poorly accessible to newcomers and difficult to follow even for experts in the field. Here we provide a comprehensive summary of research in this field since its inception that will be useful to both groups. We also discuss important ideas that have received little coverage in the literature so far. We systematically reviewed a set of 2220 publications, with detailed consideration of almost 500 of the most relevant papers. We provide a thorough introduction to the seminal work of Benjamin Libet from the 1960s to 1980s. We also discuss common criticisms of Libet's method, including temporal introspection, the interpretation of the assumed physiological correlates of volition, and various conceptual issues. We conclude with recent advances and potential future directions in the field, highlighting modern methodological approaches to volition, as well as important recent findings.

Right parietotemporal activity predicts sense of agency under uncertain delays of sensory outcomes

Sense of agency is the experience of control over one's own action and its consequent outcomes. The perceived time between a motor action and its consequent sensory outcomes (e.g., a flash of light) is shorter for a voluntary than involuntary action, a phenomenon known as intentional binding, which has been used extensively as an implicit measure of sense of agency. We developed a novel task in which participants had to respond whether a flash appeared immediately or with a delay relative to their voluntary action. We found that under high, but not low, uncertainty about the perceived time between voluntary finger movement and a subsequent flash of light, a prediction signal was generated in the right inferior parietal lobule prior to motor action. This prediction signal was linked to the emergence of a sudden insight solution (colloquially referred to as "Aha!" moment) in the right superior temporal gyrus prior to response. Single-trial event-related potential analysis revealed a reliable correlation between amplitudes of premotor and preresponse activities. The results suggest the existence of a predictive mechanism under high uncertainty about the timing of the sensory consequences of a voluntary motor action. The results are in line with the optimal cue integration theory of sense of agency, which states that both predictive and postdictive agency cues are crucial for the formation of sense of agency and the weight of each type of cue (predictive or postdictive) depends on their availability and reliability.NEW & NOTEWORTHY According to the optimal cue integration theory, the formation of sense of agency relies on both predictive and postdictive agency cues and how they are weighted based on their availability and reliability. Using a novel paradigm, we show for the first time a possible existence of a prediction signal prior to voluntary movement, which appears when postdictive agency cues (i.e., the judgment of the time between voluntary movement and a subsequent flash) are not reliable.