New Approaches to Volition
We feel we decide for ourselves what to do. We also feel that our decisions and intentions lead to our physical actions. Indeed, our culture and society seem to be built upon a concept of individuals as autonomous, conscious, responsible agents. However, neuroscience has often struggled with the idea of voluntary action. One key problem for mechanistic accounts of volition arises in trying to define the origin of voluntary actions in the brain. Further, few neuroscientific accounts have captured the “sense of agency” that characteristically accompanies human goal-directed action. I will report recent experimental work that attempts to tackle both of these problems. I hope to show that intentional action is a neural mechanism in the human brain, and that it can be studied experimentally.
Date: 1 December 2016, 13:00 (Thursday, 8th week, Michaelmas 2016)
Venue: Lecture Theatre B, Department of Experimental Psychology
Speaker: Professor Patrick Haggard (University College London)
Organising department: Department of Experimental Psychology
Organiser contact email address: matthew.apps@psy.ox.ac.uk
Host: Dr Matthew Apps (University of Oxford)
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Darren Barber