[BIC-announce] Guest Lecture on the neuroscience of volition by Pr. Uri Maoz - Thursday @ 1pm De Grandpré CC

[Mathieu Landry]

Dear colleagues,

You are invited to the following guest lecture this Thursday @1pm De Grandpré CC. FYI, Pr. Maoz is currently recruiting postdoctoral fellows: https://braininstitute.us/static-media/uploads/freewill_postdoc_2019.pdf

Title: One perspective on the neuroscience of volition

Abstract: The birth of the neuroscience of volition can be traced back to a seminal paper by Benjamin Libet and colleagues in 1983. There, a key EEG correlate of upcoming action—the readiness potential (RP)—was shown to precede subjects' reports of their decision to move. Some view this as evidence against a causal role for consciousness in human decision-making and thus against free-will and even moral responsibility. I will survey some results that extended the Libet experiments in various directions as well as some criticism of those experiments. In particular, those studies focused on arbitrary decisions—purposeless, unreasoned, and without consequences. It remained less clear to what degree the RP generalizes to deliberate, more ecological decisions. A previous study directly compared deliberate and arbitrary decision-making during a $1000-donation task to non-profit organizations. They found the expected RPs for arbitrary decisions. But those were strikingly absent for deliberate ones. Those results and their accompanying drift-diffusion model were congruent with the RP representing accumulation of noisy, random fluctuations that drive arbitrary—but not deliberate—decisions. They further point to different neural mechanisms underlying deliberate and arbitrary decisions, challenging the generalizability of studies that argue for no causal role for consciousness in decision-making to real-life decisions. Much of the work in these studies therefore arguably debates the causal efficacy of conscious intentions in bringing about human action. I will thus also describe a current, large, international collaboration between neuroscientists and philosophers aimed at investigating these questions.

Brief bio: Uri Maoz is a computational neuroscientist from Chapman University, UCLA, and Caltech. His work combines neurophysiological recordings (including online and real time), behavioral measurements, and theoretical modeling to provide a computational account of the neural underpinnings of volition and moral choice. He also currently leads a large, international and interdisciplinary project focused on how the brain underlies conscious, causal control of action.

Mathieu Landry
Razlab & NeuroSpeed Lab
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