Volition in Prospective Memory: evidence against differences in recalling free and fixed delayed intentions

Human volition can be defined as the extent to which actions are generated by internal processes, such as intentional states, or as a response to external dictated instructions. Whether actions are voluntary influence the cognitive process of action generation and perception of action. A less explored dimension is the extent to which the intention to do the voluntary action is formed immediately before the action or is a delayed intention formed further in advance of the action. In addition, it is unknown if the distinction between freely chosen actions versus externally dictated actions also has a cognitive relevance for delayed intentions similar to immediately realized intention. In the present study, we compare the difference between freely formed intentions and intentions fixed by external instructions in a prospective memory task. In prospective memory, the intention to act on a cue is stored in memory and recalled when the cue is encountered in an ongoing filler task. We examined if there would be a difference between free and fixed delayed intention on retrieval of the delayed intention by modeling the responses using a Bayesian hierarchical drift-diffusion model. From the model, we compared differences in diffusion rate and decision threshold for free and fixed intentions in the prospective memory task. Comparison of the estimated model parameters for the free and fixed intentions showed evidence against differences between free and fixed conditions in the prospective memory task. The results suggest that once an intention is encoded in memory, it no longer makes a cognitive difference at retrieval if it was initially formed freely or was fixed

Volition in prospective Memory: Evidence against differences between free and fixed target events

Volition is the extent to which actions are generated as a result of internal states in contrast to responses to external conditions or dictated by external events. Delayed intentions about future action are stored in prospective memory until the intended action has to be formed at a later point in time. It is unknown how voluntary choice affects prospective memory. We compared the difference between freely chosen and fixed targets on the reaction times and task performance in the ongoing task and for the target stimuli in a prospective memory task. The task performance and the reaction time was modelled using a Bayesian hierarchical drift-diffusion model. The analysis showed no differences between self-chosen and fixed prospective memory cues on task responses. The result suggests that volition in choosing the cue to act upon or given a fixed cue does not make a difference for prospective memory task performance