Topic: self-paced decisions

Sixty years after the discovery of a slow monotonic drift in electroencephalographic recordings preceding voluntary self-paced actions ("the readiness potential"), its physiological underpinnings remain elusive. A classical interpretation holds that readiness potential onset reflects the decision to act, with the drift thereafter proceeding deterministically to movement onset. However, more recent analyses suggest that the readiness potential's monotonicity may be an artifact of trial averaging; rather than a slow, deterministic process, fast stochastic processes underlie self-paced decisions.