Are we aware of what we are about to do? New experimental approaches to voluntary action and conscious awareness

Voluntary actions are often accompanied by a clear, preceding conscious experience of intention. However, the nature of this experience, and the neural mechanisms underlying it, have proved difficult to study scientifically. Previous studies instructed participants to make a simple manual action, followed by retrospective report about preceding intention. However, such processes of eliciting voluntary behaviour and reporting intentions have been criticised. We combined an action fluency paradigm with pseudorandom probes of conscious experience to address these issues, and used EEG to explore neural correlates of intention. In two experiments involving 51 participants, we found conscious intention emerged over 1 s before estimated action onset. Further, we found a greater decrease in EEG beta amplitude and a greater readiness-potential-like activity prior to those probes that participants reported as interrupting a conscious intention, compared to other probes. Our results provide novel evidence for a prospective experience of conscious intention associated with neural processes that generate voluntary actions.