Does the Power to Suppress an Action Make Us ‘Free’?

Mirabella, Giovanni

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-54564-2_21

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…The discussion of whether a free-will over her action truly exists is a hard problem that might be beyond the scope of empirical research ( Roskies, 2011 ). However, neuroscientific studies have shown that humans can at least consciously abort unconsciously initiated actions ( Libet et al, 1993 ; Mirabella, 2007 ; Filevich et al, 2012 ; Mirabella, 2021 ), and the neural structure of the inhibitory process has been identified to some extent ( Brass and Haggard, 2007 ). The ability to choose the best option by intentionally withholding potentiated action candidates, known as free choice, may allow for free will, rather than an omnipotent ability to do anything ( Libet et al, 1983 ; Roskies, 2011 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strong evidence for ideomotor theory: Unwilled manifestation of the conceptual attribute in movement control

2023

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Scientific understanding of how the mind generates bodily actions remains opaque. In the early 19th century, the ideomotor theory proposed that humans generate voluntary actions by imagining the sensory consequence of those actions, implying that the idea of an action’s consequence mediates between the intention to act and motor control. Despite its long history and theoretical importance, existing empirical evidence for the ideomotor theory is not strong enough to rule out alternative hypotheses. In this study, we devised a categorization-action task to evaluate ideomotor theory by testing whether an idea, distinguished from a stimulus, can modulate task-irrelevant movements. In Experiment 1, participants categorized a stimulus duration as long or short by pressing an assigned key. The results show that participants pressed the key longer when categorizing the stimulus as long than they did when characterizing it as short. In Experiment 2, we showed that the keypressing durations were not modulated by the decision category when the property of the decision category, the brightness of a stimulus, was not easily transferable to the action. In summary, our results suggest that while the perceived stimulus features have a marginal effect on response duration linearly, the decision category is the main factor affecting the response duration. Our results indicate that an abstract category attribute can strongly modulate action execution, constraining theoretical conjectures about the ideomotor account of how people voluntarily generate action.

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