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Nowhere and Everywhere: The Causal Origin of Voluntary Action

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Abstract

The idea that intentions make the difference between voluntary and non-voluntary behaviors is simple and intuitive. At the same time, we lack an understanding of how voluntary actions actually come about, and the unquestioned appeal to intentions as discrete causes of actions offers little if anything in the way of an answer. We cite evidence suggesting that the origin of actions varies depending on context and effector, and argue that actions emerge from a causal web in the brain, rather than a central origin of intentional action. We argue that this causal web need not be confined to the central nervous system, and that proprioceptive feedback might play a counterintuitive role in the decision process. Finally we argue that the complex and dynamic origins of voluntary action and their interplay with the brain’s propensity to predict the immediate future are better studied using a dynamical systems approach.

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Notes

  1. Although we have to keep in mind that activating a specific genetically-isolated sub-population of neurons may or may not correspond to something that ever happens in the life of the animal. Activating neurons through normal sensory pathways may yield more reliable neuro-behavioral mappings. However, other evidence of dynamic functional maps comes from optical imaging studies of spatial attention and optic flow processing in parietal cortex of behaving monkeys (Raffi 2005; Raffi and Siegel 2007).

  2. One might object by saying that the firing of canonical neurons is itself a consequence of a cognitive action plan, or an intention. However, the fact that canonical neurons respond very fast—100 ms after stimulus onset, (Murata et al. 1997)— and receive input relatively directly from visual areas—from IT through parietal area AIP (Borra et al. 2008) or from STP through PFG (Rozzi et al. 2006)—makes this suggestion highly unlikely.

  3. Graziano and colleagues find that although these chunks of behavior were complex—they consisted, for instance in a an action sequence of reaching towards an object, grasping the object, bringing it to the mouth, and opening the mouth—they also needed adaptation to fit the current context. While this is a form of action specification, it is a form that is incompatible with the traditional hierarchy in which details are only added at the lowest levels. In this case details are already present, and are adapted to fit the specific context.

  4. In robotics, Brooks (1986, 1991) suggested a similar control structure, based on several autonomous control layers. Higher layers were able to modulate the activity of lower layers, but these lower layers were by themselves also capable of producing behavior. This alternative structure proved to cope with challenging environments much better than its contemporaries based on a top-down structure (Nilsson 1984).

  5. Trials on which subjects were interrupted just as they were about to move were excluded from the analysis, and the distribution of slow and fast responses were the same early or late in the trial, thus ruling out the two most obvious alternative accounts (Schurger et al. 2012).

  6. Of course, even if our conjecture is correct (and it remains speculative), feedback from the body may exert only a small modulatory influence in most contexts: i.e. the “central-decision” assumption may still be valid to a first approximation, much like Newtonian dynamics in physics; relativity theory offers a fuller, subtler explanation, but very many phenomena can be accounted for without it.

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Acknowledgments

Aaron Schurger was supported by a grant from the Association Robert Debre Pour la Recherche Medicale. Sebo Uithol was supported by the EU grant ‘Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity’ (TESIS, FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828).

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain-Mind Institute, Department of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

      Aaron Schurger

    2. Center for Neuroprosthetics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

      Aaron Schurger

    3. Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Parma, Italy

      Sebo Uithol

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    1. Aaron Schurger
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    2. Sebo Uithol
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    Correspondence to Aaron Schurger or Sebo Uithol.

    Additional information

    Aaron Schurger and Sebo Uithol contributed equally to this work.

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    Schurger, A., Uithol, S. Nowhere and Everywhere: The Causal Origin of Voluntary Action. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 761–778 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0223-2

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    • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0223-2

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