Partial awareness during voluntary endogenous decision.
Consciousness and Cognition October 1, 2024 Benjamin Rebouillat, Nicolas Barascud, Sid Kouider
People often feel they have conscious control over their decisions, but whether they can actually access the content of a decision before acting on it is unclear. In an experiment where participants freely chose between two options but sometimes had to reject their decision just before execution, neural signals tracked during early deliberation revealed that the initially preferred option predicted the upcoming choice, yet this content remained mostly outside conscious awareness. Participants frequently showed overconfidence in their ability to access this content, and confidence was linked to a neural marker of self-initiated decision, suggesting a qualitative confusion in evaluating one's own decision process. These findings challenge the idea of complete agency over choices and indicate inflated awareness of forthcoming decisions.