Volition, Agency and Responsibility

The concept of individuals as free agents, who make voluntary actions, is the basis of modern societies. Yet voluntary action has proved difficult to study scientifically. This project first develops some key methods which can provide an evidence base for voluntary action: the ability to manipulate intentions with external experimental inputs, and the ability to measure the subjective experiences of volition and agency with informative psychometric measures. I then use these methods to study the cognitive mechanisms and the social impact of three key stages of processing that underlie voluntary action. These are: volition or intention itself, the sense of agency over action outcomes, and the link between volition and social responsibility. The fellowship achieves these objectives by a mixture of psychological experiments, theoretical work and interdisciplinary and wider engagement.

The first part of the project deals with volition, and builds on my previous work on the relation between initiation of action and subjective experience of intending to act. My experiments will address a major, unresolved controversy. On one view, experiences of intention are retrospective confabulations, inserted post hoc into consciousness, as apparent causes for our own actions. On another view, conscious intentions are the consequence of activating brain mechanisms that prepare actions and predict action outcomes. These two very different views of individual control, have very different implications both for psychology, and for society generally. I will test these theories experimentally, with appropriate ethical permission, by presenting subliminal primes designed to promote or inhibit action and also by safe, non-invasive transcranial electrical stimulation of relevant brain areas.

A second aspect deals with the "sense of agency" - the feeling that one's actions cause or control events in the outside world. This ubiquitous but elusive feeling is crucial to normal mental life, and forms a key component of the self. It also has obvious application to fields as diverse as law, interface engineering, and psychiatry. Again, people might infer agency retrospectively when action outcomes occur. Alternatively, intentional premotor processing might contribute to the feeling of being in control. A series of experiments test the latter hypothesis: does the process of selecting which action to make influence the sense of agency over action outcomes. In particular, stimuli that enhance fluency of forming intentions should boost sense of agency compared to stimuli that interfere with forming intentions, even when both stimuli are equally predictive of outcomes. Such experiments will test a predictive, as opposed to retrospective, view of agency, based on metacognitive experience generated by premotor processes that select and prepare actions.

Finally, human voluntary action occurs in a social context. It is sometimes even thought to be a social construct: C.P. Snow famously said "We have to believe in free will to get along". This project will include the social dimension in experimental studies of voluntary action for the first time. Using game-theoretic methods such as Prisoner's Dilemma, I will test whether the sense of agency varies when an individual's action has socially-relevant effects on another person, compared to a baseline actions that produce simple outcomes without social meaning. The influence of action's reward value will be considered, as will the degree of co-operation between the two individuals. The data will inform theories on the roles of volition and responsibility in human culture.

Ideas of volition and individual self-control are pervasive in society, and attract strong public interest. The evidence base generated will in turn inform other disciplines and will impact society generally, notably through an interdisciplinary workshop linking psychology of voluntary action and legal responsibility.

Voluntary action has recently taken a central position as an issue of public interest in the human sciences. This interest has grown with recent neuroscientific work clarifying the mechanisms underlying voluntary action, and exposing an important tension between the culturally-enshrined view of ourselves as individual free agents, and the neurophysiological evidence that our 'free' choices and actions depend on specific mechanisms, notably in the brain's frontal lobes, whose operations are largely unconscious and are profoundly integrated with the mechanisms for reward, learning and perceiving the environment.

I have contributed to the wider societal discussion and examination of this tension since my first work on voluntary action over a decade ago, and will continue to do so during Fellowship. The three main methods of impact are through translational activities within scientific work itself, through direct public engagement, and through media communication.

1. SCIENTIFIC TRANSLATION
Wider impact can be an important driver behind design, implementation and communication of science itself, alongside classical drivers such as intellectual curiosity and the importance of testing established theories against new data. This fellowship provides a clear example of research fostered by impact, in extending work on voluntary action from focus on the individual to focus on the social unit, in the third section of the research programme.

Additional impacts will come from ongoing collaborations that translate the methods and measures developed in this project to industry and medical applications. The quantitative measurement of sense of agency has industrial applications in human interface design. I have collaborated with industrial researchers using temporal binding measures to capture pilots' feelings of being in control of aircraft heading, as increasing levels of functionality were progressively delegated to an autopilot: an initial report has been submitted. Ongoing research will investigate how sense of agency relates to pilot performance, potentially improving personnel selection and training. Translational work with patients continues through collaborations with neurology and neuropsychiatry. During the Fellowship, I will particularly continue a collaboration with Prof Martin Voss (Charite, Berlin) investigating predictive and retrospective aspects of disordered agency in schizophrenia, where positive symptoms of abnormal agency and volition have profound costs in terms of patient Quality of Life, carers and society generally.

Other activities will have wider impact mediated by transdisciplinary impact. These are described in the academic beneficiaries section.

2. PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
Strong public interest in the questions surrounding 'free will' have produced several opportunities to communicate my research to the general public. I plan to continue these during the Fellowship. They include invited talks (Royal Society of Arts, LSE, Royal Institution), and science festivals (World Science Festival NYC, BergamoScienza, Brighton Science Festival).

3. MEDIA
I regularly communicate my research on voluntary action through the media, including BBC TV, Online and Radio, UK press, online columns etc. A German TV programme to which I contributed some years ago has over 19000 youtube viewings. During the Fellowship I will be making a film on the brain and inner life, with a Wellcome Trust Science and Humanities project, to culminate in a showing and panel discussion in late 2012.