Conscious intention and motor cognition
Abstract
The subjective experience of conscious intention is a key component of our mental life. Philosophers studying 'conscious free will' have discussed whether conscious intentions could cause actions, but modern neuroscience rejects this idea of mind-body causation. Instead, recent findings suggest that the conscious experience of intending to act arises from preparation for action in frontal and parietal brain areas. Intentional actions also involve a strong sense of agency, a sense of controlling events in the external world. Both intention and agency result from the brain processes for predictive motor control, not merely from retrospective inference.
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Distribution-based representations present the state-of-the-art for conventional feature extraction.
“The distribution-based representations, involving the quantiles of the (inverted) empirical cumulative density function of sensor windows present the state-of-the-art for conventional feature extraction [30].”
From Contrastive Predictive Coding for Human Activity Recognition (2021) · cites this paper as [30]
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- Authors
- Haggard, P.
- Affiliations
- University College London (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Haggard, Patrick
- ORCID
- Haggard, Patrick
- Venue
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2005-06
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 290-295
- ISSN
- 1364-6613 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2039144697
- Cited by
- 698
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 12 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 45 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 28 · 2020: 25 · 2019: 41 · 2018: 40 · 2017: 40 · 2016: 35 · 2015: 53 · 2014: 40 · 2013: 37 · 2012: 37
- FWCI
- 1.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Economic and Social Research Council
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Free Will and Agency
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Embodied and Extended Cognition
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Motor Control and Adaptation
- Keywords
- conscious intention, free will, mind-body causation, agency, predictive motor control, action preparation, frontal cortex, parietal cortex, motor cognition
- MeSH terms
- Brain, Cognition, Consciousness, Humans, Magnetics, Motion Perception, Movement, Neurons, Intention
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