The Experience of Deciding: An Electroencephalography Study

How free our actions are and how responsible we are for them partly depends on how well we are aware of what influences those actions. One way to investigate this is to compare what we are aware of and what happens in our brain before we act. Previous studies compared the onset of awareness of a decision to move with the onset of preceding brain activity. Their results have often been taken to suggest that we are unaware of some influences. We investigated the contents of awareness at the reported time of decision in more detail. Our results suggest that neural signals associated with spontaneous actions reflect something the agent is at least partly aware of. The EEG signal before actual movements was related to the reported clarity and vividness of the experience of deciding. The EEG signal before imagined movements was related to how active the imagining reportedly felt.