Abstract

Invited Symposium

Decisions: Perspectives from Philosophy, Neuropsychology and Cognitive Science

Organisation: Michael Pauen

Contributors: Thomas Goschke, John-Dylan Haynes, Norbert Kathmann, Henrik Walter

Keywords: free will, decision making, willpower, obsessive-compulsive disorder, control dilemma

 

Philosophy, neuropsychology and cognitive science have made significant advances in understanding decisions. Neuropsychologists are studying decision-making processes in healthy subjects and subjects suffering from a variety of disorders. The results both seem to call into question widespread common sense assumptions (e.g. free will) and deepen our understanding of how decision-making patterns differ in certain psychological disorders (e.g. in the case of OCD). In addition, new evidence also helps to explain our complex ability of decision-making by modeling the nature and influence of willpower on decision-making and the way in which subjects solve ubiquitous control dilemmas.

 

John-Dylan Haynes

Unconscious Neural Determinants of "Free" Will

It is a common folk-psychological intuition that we can freely choose between different behavioural options. Neuroscientific experiments challenge this view as they have shown that it is possible to predict the outcome of a decision up to several seconds before a person is aware of how they are going to decide. This lecture will give an overview of the neuroscientific work on free choices while at the same time clarifying which important questions are still open and need to be addressed in future research. Then it will delineate the consequences these findings have for concepts of free will. In particular it will become apparent that neuroscience mainly challenges the folk-psychological intuition of free will by providing first-person experiences of one's unexpected predictability.

 

Henrik Walter

Decision Making and the Concept of Willpower

Conscious and deliberate decisions often are hierarchically nested, i.e. decisions depend on prior, higher order intentions (HOI). In order to make decisions consistent with HOIs it is necessary to include the latter in the decision process, shield them from distractions, give priority to them, and not to easily revise them in case of conflicts or temptations. This effortful capacity is also known as willpower, e.g. the quantitative aspects of volition that has been reemerged within psychology and cognitive neuroscience as a subject of interest. I will review recent attempts to measure willpower with neurocognitive methods, give examples from our own research on emotion regulation, and discuss some of the challenges the concept of willpower poses for decision making.

 

Norbert Kathmann

What is Abnormal in Decision Making of Individuals with Obsessive-compulsive

Disorder?

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) leads to difficulties in making efficient and adequate decisions. Patients are indecisive, inflexible, and repeat actions in an agonizing manner. We studied decision behavior and its psychophysiological correlates in OCD patients and healthy

control samples. In a probabilistic learning and selection task (Frank et al., 2004) using combined EEG/fMRI recordings, patients were better in avoiding suboptimal than in selecting optimal choices. In a reversal task requiring reward contingency updates, OCD patients performed worse compared to controls indicating reduced flexibility. These results point to an alteration of OCD patients in processing external feedback during reward-based decision tasks. In other studies analyzing EEG responses to self-generated erroneous actions (error related negativity, ERN), OCD patients showed larger ERN amplitudes (Endrass et al., 2008), suggesting overactive internal monitoring processes. It is concluded that alterations in response monitoring and feedback processing might account for the tendency of OCD patients to avoid risky choices and instead to repeat seemingly safe actions.

 

Thomas Goschke, Stefan Scherbaum, Maja Dshemuchadse, Stefanie Beck, Hannes Ruge and Rico Fischer

Decisions under Conflict: Control Dilemmas and the Dynamics of Action Selection

Organisms pursuing goal-directed action face control dilemmas, for instance, to shield a goal from distraction vs. to flexibly switch between goals in response to significant changes (stability-flexibility-dilemma); or to choose between smaller but immediately available vs. later but larger rewards (intertemporal choice dilemma). Little is known about how such control dilemmas are solved and how agents select among complementary cognitive control operations. I will present experiments from our lab in which we combined choice-reaction and decision-making tasks with continuous measures to assess the dynamics of action selection under conflict and the adjustment of cognitive control to changing task demands.