Uri Maoz

California Institute of Technology | CIT · Division of Biology

Much attention is currently given to generative artificial intelligence (AI), but most currently available AI technologies consist in so-called decision support systems (DSSs). DSSs are meant to improve the efficiency of human decision-making by providing (ideally) relevant information about viable alternatives in domains such as medical diagnostic...

The capacity to initiate actions endogenously is critical for goal-directed behavior. Spontaneous voluntary actions are typically preceded by slow-ramping activity in medial frontal cortex that begins around two seconds before movement, which may reflect spontaneous fluctuations that influence action timing. However, the mechanisms by which these s...

We consider the problem of uncovering the time course of neural activity leading to self-initiated movements, and, relatedly, of the degree to which such activity can be used to predict when a movement is imminent. We address a major pitfall common across decades of experimental research on self-initiated movement, namely that the data epochs subje...

In recent decades, the neuroscientific community has moved from describing the neural underpinnings of mental phenomena—as characterized by experimental psychology and philosophy of mind—to attempting to redefine those mental phenomena based on neural findings. Nowadays, many are intrigued by the idea that neuroscience might provide the “missing pi...

Freely timed actions are typically preceded by a slow anticipatory buildup of cortical brain activity, which has been extensively studied. However, such free actions are also preceded by slow pupil dilations in both humans and other animals, which have barely been examined. We investigated the neurocognitive significance of antecedent pupil dilatio...

In recent decades, the neuroscientific community has moved from describing the neural underpinnings of mental phenomena – as characterized by experimental psychology and philosophy of mind – to attempting to redefine those mental phenomena based on neural findings. Nowadays, many are intrigued by the idea that neuroscience might provide the ‘missin...

In recent decades, the neuroscientific community has moved from describing the neural underpinnings of mental phenomena – as characterized by experimental psychology and philosophy of mind – to attempting to redefine those mental phenomena based on neural findings. Nowadays, many are intrigued by the idea that neuroscience might provide the ‘missin...

The neuroscience of volition is an emerging subfield of the brain sciences, with hundreds of papers on the role of consciousness in action formation published each year. This makes the state-of-the-art in the discipline poorly accessible to newcomers and difficult to follow even for experts in the field. Here we provide a comprehensive summary of r...

Background Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST) is a therapeutic technique that involves immersing an individual in an environment with minimal sensory input or stimulation. The goal of REST is to induce a state of relaxation that is deeper than what can be achieved through other forms of relaxation techniques. Research suggests that...

A scientist presents a case for a predetermined future

Voluntary actions are typically preceded by the Readiness Potential (RP), a negative midfrontal EEG deflection that begins ∼2 seconds before movement. What cognitive and neural process the RP reflects and how it relates to conscious intention remain unclear due to conflicting findings. We investigated the neural basis and cognitive significance of...

Neuroscience of volition is an emerging neuroscience subfield with hundreds of papers on the role of consciousness in action initiation published each year. This makes the state-of-the-art of the discipline poorly accessible for newcomers, as well as difficult to follow for already engaged researchers. The aim of this text is to provide a complex i...

The capacity to initiate actions endogenously is critical for goal-directed behavior. Spontaneous voluntary actions are typically preceded by slow-ramping medial frontal cortex activity that begins around two seconds before movement, which may reflect spontaneous fluctuations that influence action timing. However, the mechanisms by which these slow...

In 1983 Benjamin Libet and colleagues published a paper apparently challenging the view that the conscious intention to move precedes the brain's preparation for movement. The experiment initiated debates about the nature of intention, the neurophysiology of movement, and philosophical and legal understanding of free will and moral responsibility....

The COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophe that has caused societal upheaval globally. In the US, 2 it triggered an economic shock and laid bare societal inequities. However, it also afforded a unique 3 opportunity to elucidate the dynamics of psychosocial processes during extreme and volatile 4 conditions. From April 2020 through January 2021, we cond...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused enormous societal upheaval globally. In the US, beyond the devastating toll on life and health, it triggered an economic shock unseen since the great depression and laid bare preexisting societal inequities. The full impacts of these personal, social, economic, and public-health challenges will not be known for year...

Philosophical accounts of free will frequently appeal to deliberate, consequential, and purposeful decisions. However, some recent studies have found that laypeople attribute more freedom to arbitrary than to deliberate decisions. We hypothesized that these differences stem from diverging intuitions about concepts surrounding free will—especially f...

Most body image studies assess only linear relations between predictors and outcome variables, relying on techniques such as multiple Linear Regression. These predictor variables are often validated multi-item measures that aggregate individual items into a single scale. The advent of machine learning has made it possible to apply Nonlinear Regress...

Findings demonstrating decision-related neural activity preceding volitional actions have dominated the discussion about how science can inform the free will debate. These discussions have largely ignored studies suggesting that decisions might be influenced or biased by various unconscious processes. If these effects are indeed real, do they rende...

The Libet experiments investigated arbitrary decisions, though their results were long assumed to generalize to deliberate ones too. This has launched a debate, which is ongoing, regarding whether there are differences in the neural mechanisms underlying arbitrary and deliberate decisions. The debate thus directly relates to the extent to which the...

This chapter discusses contemporary perspectives on the role of consciousness in decision-making and action production. Everyday experience and common sense suggest that the subjective experience of will causes overt movement. But some neuroscientific research seems to provide evidence against this notion, with some claiming consciousness has no ca...

A comprehensive, falsifiable, theory of volition necessitates quantitative computational models. Ambiguous word models are insufficient to understand volition. The desiderata for computational models, and hence for understanding volition, include (1) explaining and predicting how neurons give rise to volitional decisions, as well as (2) explaining...

Philosophical theories, especially compatibilist ones, focus on the importance of beliefs and desires in the formation of human choice. This chapter reviews neuroscientific research on how beliefs and desires are instantiated in the brain, emphasizing the role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the dopaminergic pathways as a possible neural corr...

This chapter introduces the neuroscientific study of consciousness, volition, and conscious volition, discussing the lack of consensus and other obstacles neuroscientists face in identifying their neural bases. It describes how theoretical frameworks and philosophical work come into play toward this end. The chapter also discusses the importance of...

What is free will? Can it exist in a determined universe? How can we determine who, if anyone, possesses it? Philosophers have been debating these questions for millennia. In recent decades neuroscientists have joined the fray with questions of their own. Which neural mechanisms could enable conscious control of action? What are intentional actions...

The human ability for random-sequence generation (RSG) is limited but improves in a competitive game environment with feedback. However, it remains unclear how random people can be during games and whether RSG during games can improve when explicitly informing people that they must be as random as possible to win the game. Nor is it known whether a...

The human ability for random-sequence generation (RSG) is limited but improves in a competitive game environment with feedback. However, it remains unclear how random people can be during games and whether RSG during games can improve when explicitly informing people that they must be as random as possible to win the game. Nor is it known whether a...

Electromyography (EMG) is a simple, non-invasive, and cost-effective technology for measuring muscle activity. However, multi-muscle EMG is also a noisy, complex, and high-dimensional signal. It has nevertheless been widely used in a host of human-machine-interface applications (electrical wheelchairs, virtual computer mice, prosthesis, robotic fin...

Objective: Motor-imagery (MI) classification base on electroencephalography (EEG) has been long studied in neuroscience and more recently widely used in healthcare applications such as mobile assistive robots and neurorehabilitation. In particular, EEG-based motor-imagery classification methods that rely on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) hav...

Human urges, desires, and intentions manifest themselves in voluntary action. The final stages of such voluntary action are the muscle contractions that bring it about. Electromyography (EMG) signals measure such muscle contractions. Decoding action contents from EMG require advanced methods for detection, decomposition, processing, and classificat...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive societal upheaval around the world. In the US, with 20% of global COVID-19 cases, the pandemic has also triggered a substantial economic shock and laid bare societal inequities. The extreme and highly volatile nature of this time period affords a unique opportunity to elucidate the dynamics of psychosocial p...

Background: Cardiac sympathoexcitation leads to ventricular arrhythmias. Spinal anesthesia modulates sympathetic output and can be cardioprotective. However, its effect on the cardio-spinal reflexes and network interactions in the dorsal horn cardiac afferent neurons and the intermediolateral nucleus sympathetic neurons that regulate sympathetic ou...

The human ability for random-sequence generation (RSG) is limited but improves in a competitive game environment with feedback. However, it remains unclear whether RSG during games can improve when explicitly informing people that they must be as random as possible to win the game nor is it known whether any such improvement transfers to outside th...

Mudrik, L., Levy, D. J., Gavenas, J., & Maoz, U. (2020). Correction to Mudrik et al. (2020). Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 7(3), 237. https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000260 Reports an error in "Studying volition with actions that matter: Combining the fields of neuroeconomics and the neuroscience of volition" by Liad Mud...

-Background Data augmentation (DA) has recently been demonstrated to achieve considerable performance gains for deep learning (DL)—increased accuracy and stability and reduced overfitting. Some electroencephalography (EEG) tasks suffer from low samples-to-features ratio, severely reducing DL effectiveness. DA with DL thus holds transformative promi...

Electromyography (EMG) is a simple, non-invasive, and cost-effective technology for sensing muscle activity. However, EMG is also noisy, complex, and high-dimensional. It has nevertheless been widely used in a host of human-machine-interface applications (electrical wheelchairs, virtual computer mice, prosthesis, robotic fingers, etc.) and in parti...

Background Data augmentation (DA) has recently been demonstrated to achieve considerable performance gains for deep learning (DL)—increased accuracy and stability and reduced overfitting. Some electroencephalography (EEG) tasks suffer from low samples-to-features ratio, severely reducing DL effectiveness. DA with DL thus holds transformative promis...

A challenge for data sharing in systems neuroscience is the multitude of different data formats used. Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology 2.0 (NWB:N) has emerged as a standardized data format for the storage of cellular-level data together with meta-data, stimulus information, and behavior. A key next step to facilitate NWB:N adoption is to...

The neuroscience of volition has been investigating the neural underpinnings of decisions that lead to voluntary action, hereby contributing to the age-old debate on free will. It focuses on endogenous, voluntary actions that are under one’s control and on the causal role of consciousness in such actions. Thus far, studies in the field have almost...

The readiness potential (RP)—a key ERP correlate of upcoming action—is known to precede subjects' reports of their decision to move. Some view this as evidence against a causal role for consciousness in human decision-making and thus against free-will. But previous work focused on arbitrary decisions—purposeless, unreasoned, and without consequence...

Background: Rapid, preoperative identification of patients with the highest risk for medical complications is necessary to ensure that limited infrastructure and human resources are directed towards those most likely to benefit. Existing risk scores either lack specificity at the patient level or utilise the American Society of Anesthesiologists (...

The readiness potential (RP)—a key ERP correlate of upcoming action—is known to precede subjects’ reports of their decision to move. Some view this as evidence against a causal role for consciousness in human decision-making and thus against free-will. Yet those studies focused on arbitrary decisions—purposeless, unreasoned, and without consequence...

Background: As depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, large-scale surveys have been conducted to establish the occurrence and risk factors of depression. However, accurately estimating epidemiological factors leading up to depression has remained challenging. Deep-learning algorithms can be applied to assess the factors leading u...

Despite progress in cognitive neuroscience, we are still far from understanding the relations between the brain and the conscious self. We previously suggested that some neuroscientific texts that attempt to clarify these relations may in fact make them more difficult to understand. Such texts—ranging from popular science to high-impact scientific...

Humans are OK with other humans making critical financial, moral, and other decisions for them. In contrast, they tend to trust decisions based on artificial intelligence (AI) much less. This is arguably strange because such AI systems have some clear advantages over human decision-making; the latter suffers from known inconsistencies and biases an...

Background Predicting preoperative in-hospital mortality using readily-available electronic medical record (EMR) data can aid clinicians in accurately and rapidly determining surgical risk. While previous work has shown that the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) Physical Status Classification is a useful, though subjective, feature for pr...

Background: Predicting preoperative in-hospital mortality using readily-available electronic medical record (EMR) data can aid clinicians in accurately and rapidly determining surgical risk. While previous work has shown that the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) Physical Status Classification is a useful, though subjective, feature for p...

Session-level performance data.

Trial-level performance data.

Syntax to run model that generated Figure 3A in SPSS.

Syntax to run model that generated Figure 3C in SPSS.

Participant demographics and stimulation location.Age, gender, handedness, and hemisphere of language dominance of each of the 13 participants (R: right, L: left, A: ambidextrous, B: bilateral, NA: not available (language dominance was not tested)). Antiepileptic drugs refers to medications taken on the day(s) of the experiments. Also shown are the...

Tests of Model Effects for session-level behavioral metrics.Each behavioral metric was modeled as a linear scale response with stimulation hemisphere (left/right), stimulation region (angular bundle/gray matter), and an interaction term between the two (total number of sessions = 40 from 13 participants). The main effects of stimulation hemisphere...

Matlab function to generate Figures 3 and 4.

Trial by trial analysis of behavioral data.Each trial’s behavioral outcome was categorized based on whether the viewed portrait was remembered during the test phase or not (total number of trials = 1207 from 13 participants). This metric was modeled as a binary logit response (remembered/missed). Stimulation condition (on/off), stimulation hemisphe...

Syntax to run models that generated Figure 4.

The hippocampus is critical for episodic memory, and synaptic changes induced by long-term potentiation (LTP) are thought to underlie memory formation. In rodents, hippocampal LTP may be induced through electrical stimulation of the perforant path. To test whether similar techniques could improve episodic memory in humans, we implemented a microsti...

The readiness potential (RP)--a key ERP correlate of upcoming action--is known to precede subjects' reports of their decision to move. Some view this as evidence against a causal role for consciousness in human decision-making and thus against free-will. Yet those studies focused on arbitrary decisions--purposeless, unreasoned, and without conseque...

The onset of the readiness potential (RP)—a key neural correlate of upcoming action—was repeatedly found to precede subjects’ reports of having made an internal decision. This is famously taken as evidence against a causal role for consciousness in human decisions making and thus as a denial of free-will. Yet those studies focused on purposeless, u...

A defendant is criminally responsible for his action only if he is shown to have engaged in a guilty act—actus reus (eg for larceny, voluntarily taking someone else's property without permission)—while possessing a guilty mind—mens rea (eg knowing that he had taken someone else's property without permission, intending not to return it)—and lacking...

In the Libet paradigm, subjects move their hand at will and report when they first felt the urge to move; information about the upcoming movement was shown to exist in their brains up to 10 seconds before movement onset. These results led some to conclude that conscious decisions are not part of the causal chain leading to action. However, various...

"In 1965, Hans Kornhuber and Luder Deecke made a discovery that greatly influenced the study of voluntary action. Using electroencephalography (EEG), they showed that when aligning some tens of trials to movement onset and averaging, a slowly decreasing electrical potential emerges over central regions of the brain. It starts 1 second ( s) or so be...

The fifth edition of a work that defines the field of cognitive neuroscience, with entirely new material that reflects recent advances in the field. Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The fifth edition of The Cognitive Neurosciences continues to chart new directions...

Our intuitive concept of the relations between brain and mind is increasingly challenged by the scientific world view. Yet, although few neuroscientists openly endorse Cartesian dualism, careful reading reveals dualistic intuitions in prominent neuroscientific texts. Here, we present the "double-subject fallacy": treating the brain and the entire p...

Rational, value-based decision-making mandates selecting the option with highest subjective expected value after appropriate deliberation. We examined activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and striatum of monkeys deciding between smaller, immediate rewards and larger, delayed ones. We previously found neurons that modulated their a...

The two-thirds power law, postulating an inverse local relation between the velocity and cubed root of curvature of planar trajectories, is a long established simplifying principle of human hand movements. In perception, the motion of a dot along a planar elliptical path appears most uniform for speed profiles closer to those predicted by the power...

Identifying ictal onset frequencies with wide spectrum EEG frequency analysis.

The ability to predict action content from neural signals in real time before the action occurs has been long sought in the neuroscientific study of decision-making, agency and volition. On-line real-time (ORT) prediction is important for understanding the relation between neural correlates of decision-making and conscious, voluntary action as well...

One long-established simplifying principle behind the large repertoire and high versatility of human hand movements is the two-thirds power law-an empirical law stating a relationship between local geometry and kinematics of human hand trajectories during planar curved movements. It was further generalized not only to various types of human movemen...

It has long been acknowledged that planar hand drawing movements conform to a relationship between movement speed and shape, such that movement speed is inversely proportional to the curvature to the power of one-third. Previous literature has detailed potential explanations for the power law's existence as well as systematic deviations from it. Ho...

The two-thirds power law, an empirical law stating an inverse non-linear relationship between the tangential hand speed and the curvature of its trajectory during curved motion, is widely acknowledged to be an in- variant of upper-limb movement. It has also been shown to exist in eye- motion, locomotion and was even demonstrated in motion perceptio...

The two-thirds power law, an empirical law stating an inverse non-linear relationship between the tangential hand speed and the curvature of its trajectory during curved motion, is widely acknowledged to be an invariant of upper-limb movement. It has also been shown to exist in eyemotion, locomotion and was even demonstrated in motion perception an...