Final Report Summary - HUMVOL (Human Volition, Agency and Responsibility)
The capacity to act autonomously is a distinctive feature of healthy adult humans. It is typically expressed through free, voluntary actions, where the agent decides for themselves how to act, and then acts. By doing so, the agent achieves control over their immediate environment, and becomes responsible before society for the consequences of their actions. The cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these three key elements of human mental life, volition, agency and responsibility, are poorly understood, and they were often considered unsuitable for scientific inquiry. This project aimed to study volition, agency and responsibility with the rigorous methods of experimental design from human psychology, novel psychophysical measures of the phenomenal experience of action, and quantitative neurophysiological measures of sensorimotor processing. Over a series of experiments in healthy volunteers, and in patients with various neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions, the project investigated the origin and elaboration of voluntary actions in the human brain. Further, it pioneered new, quantitative measures of the subjective experience of intending actions, and controlling their outcomes - the so-called "sense of agency". This work was able to show, for the first time, the factors that influence the human sense of agency, using indirect measures based on time perception. The results pointed to the role of both individual-level factors, such as motivation and learning, and societal factors, such as coercion, in shaping the human sense of agency. Using these measures, the project approached the question of responsibility for action. The findings suggested that a sense of responsibility is a subjective byproduct of voluntary, cognitive motor control. The feeling of responsibility is thus rooted in the brain's neuromotor mechanisms, yet also provides the necessary basis for large-scale human social interactions. The project's research findings have major implications for philosophy, for psychiatry, and for law.