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Top-down modulation of brain activity underlying intentional action and its relationship with awareness of intention: an ERP/Laplacian analysis

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Abstract

Intentional actions are executed with the peculiar experience of “I decide to do that.” It has been proposed that intentional actions involve a specific brain network involving the supplementary motor areas (SMAs). Here, we manipulated the internal representation participants attended to (intention vs. movement) in order to (1) examine the activity of SMAs and of the primary motor cortex (M1) during intentional action preparation and execution, and (2) investigate the temporal relationship between activity in these structures and intention awareness. Participants performed self-paced key presses. After each key press, participants were asked to report either the time they had the first intention to press the key (W-condition) or the time they actually started the movement (M-condition). We then estimated surface Laplacians from brain electrical potentials recorded while participants were performing the task. Activity in SMAs was greater in the W-condition than in the M-condition more than 1 s before electromyographic (EMG) activation, suggesting that this region is indeed associated to the formation of conscious intention. Conversely, activity in primary motor cortex (M1) contralateral to the responding hand was larger in the M-condition than in the W-condition, revealing that this region is also modulated by top-down processes. In addition, waveforms time-locked to the W-judgement revealed that M1 as well as EMG activation preceded the time at which participants become aware of their intention by about 0.3 s. This observation argues against the possibility that the temporal delay between motor-related activation and intention awareness results from smearing artifacts.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Centro Universitario Internazionale, Monte San Savino, Italy, and the Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo (Cariparo), Italy. The authors would like to thank Sandro Bettella for technical support, Boris Burle and Dimitrios Kourtis for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padua, Italy

    Davide Rigoni & Giuseppe Sartori

  2. Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Aix-Marseille I Université, CNRS: UMR 7291, Marseille, France

    Davide Rigoni & Franck Vidal

  3. Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, 2 Henri Dunantlaan, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Davide Rigoni & Marcel Brass

  4. Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Marcel Brass

  5. Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA/DSV/I2BM NeuroSpin Center, INSERM U992, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Clémence Roger

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  1. Davide Rigoni
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  2. Marcel Brass
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  3. Clémence Roger
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  4. Franck Vidal
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Correspondence to Davide Rigoni.

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221_2013_3400_MOESM1_ESM.tiff

Laplacian surface estimates and EMG traces, time-locked to the W-judgment, for each participant. The black solid line indicates the W-judgment. The left y-axis indicates the amplitude for the surface Laplacian estimates, and the right y-axis marks the amplitude for the EMG signal. (TIFF 760 kb)

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Rigoni, D., Brass, M., Roger, C. et al. Top-down modulation of brain activity underlying intentional action and its relationship with awareness of intention: an ERP/Laplacian analysis. Exp Brain Res 229, 347–357 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3400-0

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