Action fluency and conscious intention: being aware of what we are about to do

Voluntary actions are often accompanied by a clear, preceding conscious experience of intention. However, the nature of this experience, and the neural mechanisms underlying it, have proved difficult to study scientifically. Many previous studies instructed participants to make simple manual actions, and then report their preceding intention only retrospectively. We combined an action fluency paradigm with pseudorandom probes of conscious experience to address these issues, and used EEG to explore neural correlates of prospective intention. In two experiments involving 51 participants, we found conscious intention emerged over 1 s before estimated action onset. Further, we found a readiness-potential-like activity that was stronger prior to those probes that participants reported as interrupting a conscious intention, compared to other probes. In addition, probes that interrupted conscious intention were found to occur after lateralization of the readiness-potential-like activity to the hemisphere contralateral to the intended to type the first letter. Our results provide novel evidence for a prospective experience of conscious intention associated with neural processes that generate voluntary actions.