Lost in Time... The search for conscious intentions and Readiness Potentials
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2011-08-25
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en
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In 1983 Libet et al. found some remarkable results concerning the timing of the conscious intention to act in humans. Libet et al. used the Readiness Potential (RP) as an indicator of the neuronal preparation for a voluntary movement and found that
the RP preceded the conscious intention to act by 350 and the actual movement by 500ms on average. I conducted a similar experiment to that of Libet et al. using EEG and was able to replicate their results, but encountered several complexities along the way which made me question the found onset times of both RP and conscious intention. Averaging and filtering are common methods to remove noise from the recorded EEG. These methods however, can provide a distorted view of the
original signal, shifting the actual onset of the RP to an earlier or later time point. Also, each participant produces different brain signals and has a different understanding of the task at hand which makes determining the best recording site for the RP and the exact onset of a conscious intention quite hard. I propose using a classifier to determine a more accurate onset of the RP and find out whether the RP indeed precedes the conscious intention to act by a significant amount of time on a
single trial level.
Keywords: readiness potential, conscious intention, EEG, movement.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen