Abstract
The neural signals that give rise to our experience of the actions we perform are not well understood. Obhi et al. (Cognition 110:65–73, 2009) proposed that both efferent and re-afferent signals contribute to the conscious awareness of intentional actions. We further highlight the role of these signals in the awareness of our actions and the intention to perform these actions. We obtained temporal judgments of movement onset and the intention to execute finger and toe movements. This enabled us to compare our results with predictions corresponding to the conduction length of either effector. Our results confirm the findings of Obhi et al. (Cognition 110:65–73, 2009) that both efferent and re-afferent signals contribute to the awareness of planned actions and suggest that these signals may also play a role in our experience of our intention to perform an action.
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Notes
Searle (1983) distinguished two forms of intention, ‘intention-in-action’ and ‘prior intention’, to refer to the necessary antecedents for a specific action and pre-meditated intentions that may or may not be carried out, respectively. Here we restrict ourselves to intention-in-action.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a discovery grant from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada awarded to SSO, and infrastructure provided by funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (to SSO).
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Strother, L., Obhi, S.S. The conscious experience of action and intention. Exp Brain Res 198, 535–539 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1946-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1946-7