Prospective and retrospective contributions to intention awareness in voluntary action

Spontaneous, voluntary actions are often accompanied by motor intentions, that is the experience of “being about to move”. The emergence of this experience is contentiously discussed, culminating in two opposing views of motor intention. While prospective theorists hold that an intention to move genuinely precedes the action, retrospective theorists suggest that an intention is reconstructed only after action execution. As such, both theories offer radically different predictions about the possibility of voluntary control over action intention. We assess here the respective contributions of prospective and retrospective factors in motor intention awareness in a real-time EEG setup. Participants performed self-paced movements with intermittent interruption by cues, signalling to either move or not to move. Cues were triggered by a brain-computer interface upon detection of either the presence or absence of a readiness potential (RP), a signal known to precede self-paced voluntary actions. Subsequently, participants reported their intention to move at the time of the cue. We found that participants were more likely to report an intention to move when the cue was followed by a movement than no movement, highlighting the effect of retrospection on awareness of intention. Interestingly, however, an intention to move was also more frequently reported when the cue was elicited by an RP, compared to when no RP was present, suggesting that awareness of intention is also informed by motor preparation processes, congruent with prospective theories. Overall, our findings show that intention awareness in voluntary action relies on both prospective and retrospective components, and we describe here how these two factors are dynamically integrated over time.