Judgments of moving and intending to move in a timed-response task

Subjects performed a timed-response task in which they attempted to synchronize a rapid flexion of the index finger of their preferred hand with the last of a train of four regularly spaced acoustic clicks. The task was used to stabilize the execution time of a simple voluntary response in order to facilitate psychophysical judgments about the subjects' perception of having responded and of having intended to respond. In the first experiment, male subjects (N = 6) adjusted the appearance time of a reference stimulus (a brief percutaneous pulse to the responding finger) until it appeared to be simultaneous with their perception of having made the response. All subjects adjusted the reference stimulus to appear after response onset during the latter half of the force impulse. This finding suggests that the perception of having responded is based on peripheral feedback from the response. In the second experiment, male subjects (N = 6) performed the same motor task, but adjusted the time of the reference stimulus so that it appeared to be simultaneous with their intention to respond. Two subjects were not able to do the task successfully; the remaining four subjects adjusted the reference stimulus to appear from 101 to 145 ms before response onset. This finding suggests that the intention to respond is perceptually separable from the response itself and occurs at a measurable time before response onset.