Battery of intentional agency tasks

<p>Abstract copyright data collection owner.</p>A key aim of psychology is to explain the causes of human actions. However, mechanisms of intention, motivation, and agency have remained difficult to study experimentally, and their underlying psychological organisation remains unclear. This data gives measures of cognitive-motor performance of 94 healthy adult volunteers in a test battery designed to study intention and agency in humans. We used factor analysis to identify common action processes across a battery of five laboratory tasks measuring sense of agency, value-based decision-making, choice reactions, reactive inhibition and intentional inhibition. A three-factor solution was identified. The first factor, labelled ideomotor action control, involved unbiased experience of one’s own action consequences, together with good performance in risky monetary decision-making. Interestingly, low scores on this factor would suggest a distortion in the ability to represent and exploit one’s own instrumental effect on external events. The second factor, labelled psychomotor regulation, combined motor efficiency with a biased experience of one’s own actions. The third factor loaded exclusively on inhibitory control of pre-potent actions. Interestingly, it was unrelated to both decision-making variables and agency variables. Our results suggest clear linkage between decision-making processes and the phenomenology of action, even though these areas have historically been studied quite independently. Further, we show that cognitive control and experience of agency has a rich and reliable internal structure. Specifically, our results suggest two distinct and independent components of sense of agency: a bias in action awareness linked to psychomotor efficiency, and a bias in outcome awareness linked to poor decision-making.<p>Project description:</p>Most people recognise the experience of stopping themselves 'just in time' before committing an unwise action. We call this process 'intentional inhibition'. The capacity for intentional inhibition is as important for human volition as the capacity for initiating actions, and is essential for successful social interaction. However, it has been largely ignored, perhaps because it produces no measurable behavioural output. Yet our preliminary studies successfully identified processes of intentional inhibition distinct from external inhibition previously studied with 'stop' signals. We therefore propose the first systematic research programme on intentional inhibition of human action. Experimental paradigms for eliciting intentional inhibition are developed and implemented across four complementary laboratories. These are used to investigate psychological (CC1: London) and neural (CC2: Gent) mechanisms of intentional inhibition, and interactions of these mechanisms with reward, emotion and social context. The emergence of intentional inhibition in normal child development (CC3: Leiden) is contrasted with striking pathologies of the action/inhibition balance in Tourette's Syndrome (CC4: Hamburg). Specific research collaborations transfer knowledge and skills between partners, and integrate the various studies. We aim for a rigorous, scientific approach to a crucial but under-investigated aspect of human nature and individual behaviour