Unconscious priming dissociates ‘free choice’ from ‘spontaneous urge’ responses

摘要: Abstract Advances in neuroscience offer the exciting prospect of understanding ‘free’ choices – subject free will debate philosophy. However, while physiological techniques and analysis have progressed rapidly to meet this challenge, task design has not. The challenge is now develop laboratory tasks that adequately capture picking or choosing. To isolate ‘internally’ generated intentions from those impelled by external stimulus, observers are asked ‘choose freely’ wait for a felt ‘urge’. no previous work explicitly distinguished between instructions refer ‘urges’ versus ‘choosing’. philosopher Alfred Mele (e.g., 2009; 2014) argued distinction crucial conceptual importance, but two not yet been empirically distinguished. Here, we show conscious unconscious, task-irrelevant primes, bias observers’ binary when they instructed freely’, ‘wait an urge’, underscoring practical importance Mele’s distinction. Neuroscience must incorporate if understand processes underpinning choice.