Complex problems often allow multiple paths to a solution. Choosing and taking the best path is an important part of the executive cognition that underpins intelligent problem-solving behavior. However, once a path is chosen, the motor system must be activated for executing it. This interface between problem-solving and self-generated action has rarely been studied. We recorded EEG movement-related potentials while 25 participants (7 males, 18 females) performed the “Tower of London” problem-solving task. In a control condition, participants merely followed instructed steps without planning for any goal and thus without any sense that their movements solved a problem. Readiness potentials (RPs) preceding actions showed a more sustained preparatory negativity for self-generated than stimulus-driven movements. Critically, this effect was most pronounced at the first move of a sequence and diminished at later stages, indicating that preparatory activity is closely linked to the planning demands of sequence initiation. Consistent with this, contralateral motor β-band suppression was stronger for self-generated actions, particularly at sequence onset, but remained present across all moves, indicating that it is not selectively modulated by sequence position in the same way as the RP. Multivariate pattern analysis further showed that self-generated and stimulus-driven actions could be reliably distinguished throughout the entire preparatory period. Taken together, these results show a deep interaction between executive function and self-generated actions and draw attention to the fact that, if a problem can be solved, then actually solving it generally requires executive cognition to trigger self-generated actions, based on a plan.

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.

Social touch is shaped by relationship closeness and culturally influenced boundaries. However, emerging digital systems are reshaping how touch can be experienced, enabling touch-like sensations to be delivered remotely via robotic, wearable, and contactless interfaces. Yet, it remains unclear whether relationship-dependent patterns of touch permissibility observed in everyday life also extend to technology-mediated touch. In an online body-mapping study, 147 participants from six countries rated emotional bond toward multiple social-network members and an AI agent and indicated which body regions they would allow each target to touch across physical and three technology-mediated modalities. Across modalities, emotional bond robustly predicted a touchability index derived from the mapped body areas, indicating a consistent positive association between relationship closeness and touch permissibility even when tactile sensations are technologically delivered. This relationship-dependent pattern was observed across countries, alongside cross-cultural differences in baseline permissiveness and gradient strength. Touch-allowed maps further showed that mediated modalities exhibited spatial patterns broadly similar to those observed in physical touch, with closer network members granted access to broader and more intimate regions, and distant ties largely restricted to distal, socially neutral areas. AI agents were permitted greater bodily access than human strangers but exhibited weaker bond dependence and were more strongly associated with pragmatic than affective motives for touch. Together, these findings suggest that technology-mediated touch may be interpreted through existing relationship-dependent expectations governing bodily boundaries, rather than constituting a fully distinct category of digital interaction.

The capacity for voluntary action is a distinctive feature of human minds. However, experimental studies of volition struggled to capture defining features of human voluntariness. Here we developed a competitive game which incentivised participants to innovate their action choices to find the right time to avoid a collision with an opponent who predicted the timing of the participant’s action choice. One group of participants received explicit information about the competitor’s action-selection rules, while a second group had no information about the competitor. Both groups showed increased behavioural stochasticity when adapting to a competitor who punished participant’s choice biases. However, the group who had no explicit information generated their action choices in a way that avoided the action that the competitor was likely to take. In contrast, the group who explicitly knew the competitor’s action-selection rules avoided the same action they took in preceding trials so that the competitor could not easily exploit the participant’s behavioural patterns. These findings suggest that people can develop beliefs about other agents in the social environment within which they work, and can adapt voluntary action choices accordingly. However, explicit explanations about the other agent facilitate model-based planning in the voluntary generation of novel action patterns.

Deciding what to do should typically involve considering what could have been done, but in fact was not done. We tested whether such unchosen alternative action paths leave traces in memory. Across two behavioural experiments, participants solved a modified Tower of London (ToL) task in which each problem afforded two alternative and equivalent optimal solution paths. They then undertook a recognition test in which they viewed configurations of the ToL drawn either from the chosen path, the unchosen path, or from new, unviewed configurations. Participants were consistently more likely to judge (falsely) that they had previously seen configurations from the unchosen but plausible path, compared to novel configurations. Signal detection analyses further showed reduced discriminability and a more liberal decision criterion for alternative-path configurations compared to control novel configurations. Unchosen action alternatives may be difficult to distinguish from actions that are actually executed, but may have a feeling of familiarity that leads to an “old” response. This effect replicated when novel items were matched to alternative items in visual similarity, ruling out explanations based on perceptual confusability. The results suggest that action planning generates representations of unchosen alternatives that can persist and bias later memory, even if not executed. Planning therefore leaves behind more than a route towards action goals: it also leaves mnemonic traces of paths not taken.

Interoceptive rhythms have been shown to shape when we act, with voluntary actions clustering in specific cardio-respiratory phases. Whether these phase-dependent biases also influence sense of agency (SoA), the feeling of controlling one’s actions and their outcomes, remains unclear. In a preregistered study (N = 46), we combined intentional binding with continuous cardio-respiratory recordings to examine phase-dependent modulation of action and tone binding. Actions preferentially clustered during early systole and mid-expiration, replicating prior work. Action binding, indexing agency over actions themselves, was unaffected by cardio-respiratory phase. Conversely, tone binding, indexing agency over outcomes, was enhanced when tones occurred during inspiration, particularly in combination with diastole. Exploratory analyses showed that individuals whose actions tended to align such that tones occurred during systole exhibited weaker tone binding. These findings suggest that cardio-respiratory rhythms gate when we act and selectively influence retrospective agency attribution, without affecting the prospective feeling of control over actions.

Rising environmental temperatures challenge nervous systems. We examine how neural systems enable acclimation to prolonged heat exposure, the limits of such adaptation, and the behavioural and social strategies that shape heat resilience. Understanding the neural mechanisms of adaptation to heat may inform strategies to cope with a warming world.

Innovations in the automotive industry, such as autonomous driving, AI assistants, head-up displays, and midair haptic touchless interactions, promise transformative benefits but may also introduce unanticipated risks and ethical concerns. To explore these potential challenges, we conducted a multi-stage study: first, we engaged 27 engineers specializing in touchless and automotive systems to envision future applications of mid-air haptics and head-up displays. Insights from this anticipatory design fiction informed the creation of high-fidelity storyboard sketches depicting six hypothetical scenarios. Using these storyboards and a custom questionnaire, we then surveyed 135 drivers across nine countries to assess their views on technology acceptance, interface usability, and responsible innovation. Results revealed significant demographic variability, alongside a dual sentiment: while drivers express enthusiasm for technological integration, they also voice concerns about safety, user control, and privacy. Our findings not only inform safer and more user-centered automotive innovation but also offer a multimodal framework for evaluating and guiding emerging technologies across diverse fields.

Sudden and surprising sensory events evoke rapid behavioural responses essential for orienting toward, evaluating, and avoiding potential threats. Two competing accounts propose that these responses are either modality-dependent, with different sensory channels eliciting distinct reactive behaviours, or modality-independent, reflecting the engagement of shared supramodal mechanisms. To test these hypotheses, we quantified whole-body kinematic responses to sudden auditory and somatic stimuli delivered from the left or right side of the body. Kinematics was analysed combining spatiotemporal principal component analysis (stPCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), allowing the extraction of low-dimensional movement components and the identification of kinematic patterns related to stimulus location. Both auditory and somatic stimuli elicited a dominant escape response characterized by a displacement of the upper body away from the stimulus. There was cross-modal similarity in the spatial organization of these defensive movements, supporting the existence of a shared mechanism underlying this reactive behaviour. Additionally, each modality evoked distinct local responses. Auditory stimuli evoked an orienting response consisting of head rotation toward the stimulus, whereas somatic stimulation evoked an early abduction of the stimulated arm, consistent with a localized defensive response. These findings demonstrate that reactive behaviour emerges from the interaction of shared and modality-specific processes. While a common defensive drive appears to organize large-scale escape movements across sensory modalities, modality-specific mechanisms contribute with additional local responses adapted to the behavioural demands associated with different sensory information. More broadly, the present study introduces a powerful analytical framework for characterizing the spatiotemporal organization of whole-body reactive behaviour in humans.

Skin stimuli reach the brain via multiple neural channels specific for different stimulus types. These channels interact in the spinal cord, typically through inhibition. Inter-channel interactions can be investigated by selectively stimulating one channel and comparing the sensations that result when another sensory channel is or is not concurrently stimulated. Applying this logic to thermal-mechanical interactions proves difficult, because most existing thermal stimulators involve skin contact. We used a novel non-tactile stimulator for focal cooling (9 mm2) by using thermal imaging of skin temperature as a feedback signal to regulate exposure to a dry-ice source. We could then investigate how touch modulates cold sensation by delivering cooling to the human hand dorsum in either the presence or absence of light touch. Across three signal detection experiments, we found that sensitivity to cooling was significantly reduced by touch. This reduction was specific to touch, as it did not occur when presenting auditory signals instead of the tactile input, making explanations based on distraction or attention unlikely. Our findings suggest that touch inhibits cold perception, recalling interactions of touch and pain previously described by Pain Gate Theory.

Internal bodily signals, notably the heartbeat, influence our perception of the external world—but the nature of this influence remains unclear. Different frameworks, originating in opposing views of the function of interoception, have developed largely in parallel. One line of evidence (Internal/External Competition) indicates that interoceptive and exteroceptive inputs compete for neural resources. Another line (Self-related Facilitation) shows a link between interoceptive and self-related processing, which might include computing the self-relevance of exteroceptive inputs. We contrasted these accounts within a single experimental task for which they yielded distinct predictions. We measured heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs, a measure of cardiac interoception) with electroencephalogram and manipulated the self-relevance of an audio-tactile stimulus by placing the audio source either inside or outside the peripersonal space immediately around the body. On the one hand, prestimulus HEP amplitudes over the somatosensory cortex were linked to slower reaction times and affected audio-tactile stimulus-evoked responses in the same area, indicating competition for shared neural resources. On the other hand, prestimulus HEPs over integrative sensorimotor and default-mode network regions facilitated stimulus self-relevance encoding, both in reaction times and audio-tactile evoked responses. Importantly, Competition and Facilitation effects were spatially and statistically independent from each other. We therefore reconcile the two views by showing the coexistence of two independent mechanisms: one that allocates neural resources to either internal bodily signals or the external world, and another by which interoception and exteroception are combined to determine the self-relevance of external signals. Our results highlight the multidimensionality of HEPs and of internal states more generally.

Human experimental psychology seems inextricably bound up with a notion of self, or individual mental life. The link between self and body has always been acknowledged, but psychologists have few ways to investigate, analyze, or understand this link. As 2025 marks the 50th birthday of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance and 20 years since the publication of our "Re-Visiting the Rubber Hand Illusion" article in the journal, we take this opportunity to reflect on the impact, reach, and major developments that followed its publication. In particular, we focus on how the methods and theoretical constructs from our article have extended the concepts of bodily self-awareness toward other fields beyond experimental psychology. Our article helped to develop experimental approaches to understanding the role of the body in self-awareness, and mental life more generally. The combination of rigorous experimental methods and a clear theoretical model has allowed psychologists to have a clearer view of the relation between body and self.

Religion is a widespread feature of human life. Religions typically include both distinctive varieties of experience and also a set of foundational beliefs. An additional, but often overlooked, part of many religions is their expression through specific actions, which we here designate religious motor behaviours. Here we describe these religious motor behaviours and offer a taxonomy based on the conceptual schemes of movement neuroscience and neurology. Thus, religious rituals include both behaviours characterized by decreased motor output (e.g. ritualistic silence) and behaviours characterized by increased motor output (e.g. ritual dances). Neurology often also distinguishes between movements that are experienced as voluntary or involuntary. We show that this same distinction can also apply to religious experiences, since these may be characterized either by a heightened sense of personal control or a sense of being controlled by an external, divine source. We then use these conceptual structures of movement neuroscience to investigate examples from a wide range of religious contexts. We thereby categorize religious motor behaviours into different classes, focusing on specific examples: repetitive ritual actions; motor behaviours where the experience of volition is altered, such as automatisms; and possession-like states. We suggest that a scientific approach to these behaviours should include their predominant phenomenological presentation, the accompanying subjective experience of volition and the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. This investigation shows rich parallels between religious motor behaviours and motor behaviours observed in neurological disorders, including those that present with functional neurological symptoms. Our approach does not and should not pathologize religious motor behaviours, but rather draws attention to a rich set of non-clinical motor phenomena that highlights important social, cultural and psychological elements of human movement control. Movement neuroscience and religious activity have unexplored overlaps and can usefully learn from each other.

The sense of agency refers to the subjective experience of controlling one's own actions and their outcomes. While agency is often thought to increase with better performance, it remains unclear how it evolves during learning. In this study, we investigated how the sense of agency changes as individuals learn when to act through reinforcement-based adaptation. We used intentional binding (IB)-a widely used, though debated, proxy measure for agency-related processes-to track temporal compression between actions and outcomes during a time-based learning task. Across four experiments, we found that IB decreased with learning, but only when feedback was imprecise yet stable, and when the outcome used to probe IB was irrelevant to the learning task. These results suggest that agency-related processes, as indexed by IB, may diminish when adaptation guides action selection, and when the outcome becomes less epistemically relevant. We discuss the possible implications of these changes in IB with learning for the sense of agency.

The spinal cord is the key bridge between the brain and the body. However, scientific understanding of healthy spinal cord function has historically been limited because noninvasive measures of its neural activity have proven exceptionally challenging. In this work, we describe a novel recording and analysis approach to obtain non-invasive, high-resolution images of the electrical activity of the spinal cord in humans (Electrical Spinal Imaging, ESI). ESI is analytically simple, easy to implement, and data-driven: it does not involve template-based strategies prone to produce spurious signals. Using this approach we provide a detailed description and physiological characterization of the spatiotemporal dynamics of the peripheral, spinal and cortical activity elicited by somatosensory stimulation. We also demonstrate that attention modulates post-synaptic activity at spinal cord level.  Our method has enabled four new insights regarding spinal cord activity. (1) We identified three distinct responses in the time domain: sP9, sN13 and sP22. (2) The sP9 is a traveling wave reflecting the afferent volley entering the spinal cord through the dorsal root. (3) In contrast, the sN13 and sP22 reflect segmental post-synaptic activity. (4) While the sP9 response is first seen on the dorsal electrodes ipsilateral to the stimulated side, the sN13 and sP22 were not lateralised with respect to the side of stimulation. (5) Unimodal attention strongly modulates the amplitude of the sP22, but not that of the sP9 and sN13 components. The proposed method offers critical insights into the spatiotemporal dynamics of somatosensory processing within the spinal cord, paving the way for precise non-invasive functional monitoring of the spinal cord  in basic and clinical neurophysiology. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Making each action at the right time is crucial for motor control. In this study, we investigated how two prominent motor preparatory processes identified in human EEG — beta-band desynchronization and the readiness potential (RP) — might each contribute to determining the time of a simple voluntary action. In our paradigm, participants learned when to act in each block of trials, based on probabilistic trial-by-trial feedback. A reward schedule reinforced a specific optimal time to act in some blocks, but allowed greater variability around the same mean action time in other blocks. We found that contralateral motor beta-band power at the beginning of each trial increased with the mean waiting time in each block. Computationally, this pattern is consistent with a neural implementation of distance-to-bound for a noisy accumulation process, in which baseline motor activity starts off closer to an action-triggering bound when fast actions are required. In contrast, the RP was independent of the mean waiting time before action, but its slope increased when participants developed a precise motor plan. We suggest that beta desynchronization and the RP track distinct, complementary processes involved in the temporal control of action. While beta-power activity at trial onset is consistent with a neural implementation of urgency, the RP captures an internal decision variable that reflects a noisy accumulation process. Simulations suggest that acting at the right time may involve increasing the strength of the input to this accumulator, which can cause the decision variable to drift towards the decision bound.

Digital touch refers to haptic technologies that deliver somatic sensations primarily via cutaneous mechanoreceptors, with additional involvement of deeper receptors (e.g., muscles and joints). Like all emerging technologies, its benefits must be balanced against potential risks. We explore ethical concerns for future digital touch technologies by analysing the distinctive physiology and function of the human somatosensory system. Much current research on digital touch focuses on active touch. However, we argue that most pressing ethical concerns emerge with passive touch, where touch stimuli are controlled by external agents. First, somatosensation is “always on”. Haptic technologies such as alerting systems often make use of this sensory availability, although doing so potentially undermines our sensory autonomy—the right to control our own sensations. Second, users need transparency about who/what is touching them and why, necessitating clear consent mechanisms. Third, as touch directly connects us with our environment, haptics that alter this interaction pose significant epistemic challenges, potentially distorting a user's perception of reality. Our analysis raises critical questions about cultural norms, privacy of bodily sensation, bodily self-awareness, control, transparency, and epistemic procedures. We propose an ethical design framework for digital touch, comprising four simple questions to guide future development of digital touch systems.