Jo Han-Gue, Wittmann Marc, Hinterberger Thilo, Schmidt Stefan
Department of Psychosomatic Medicine, University Medical Center Freiburg Freiburg, Germany ; Institute for Transcultural Health Studies, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany.
Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health Freiburg, Germany.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2014 Jun 10;8:421. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00421. eCollection 2014.
When a voluntary action is causally linked with a sensory outcome, the action and its consequent effect are perceived as being closer together in time. This effect is called intentional binding. Although many experiments were conducted on this phenomenon, the underlying neural mechanisms are not well understood. While intentional binding is specific to voluntary action, we presumed that preconscious brain activity (the readiness potential, RP), which occurs before an action is made, might play an important role in this binding effect. In this study, the brain dynamics were recorded with electroencephalography (EEG) and analyzed in single-trials in order to estimate whether intentional binding is correlated with the early neural processes. Moreover, we were interested in different behavioral performance between meditators and non-meditators since meditators are expected to be able to keep attention more consistently on a task. Thus, we performed the intentional binding paradigm with 20 mindfulness meditators and compared them to matched controls. Although, we did not observe a group effect on either behavioral data or EEG recordings, we found that self-initiated movements following ongoing negative deflections of slow cortical potentials (SCPs) result in a stronger binding effect compared to positive potentials, especially regarding the perceived time of the consequent effect. Our results provide the first direct evidence that the early neural activity within the range of SCPs affects perceived time of a sensory outcome that is caused by intentional action.
当一个自主动作与一个感觉结果存在因果联系时，该动作及其后续效果在时间上会被感知为更紧密地联系在一起。这种效应被称为意向性绑定。尽管针对这一现象进行了许多实验，但其潜在的神经机制尚未得到充分理解。虽然意向性绑定特定于自主动作，但我们推测，在动作执行之前出现的前意识大脑活动（准备电位，RP）可能在这种绑定效应中发挥重要作用。在本研究中，使用脑电图（EEG）记录大脑动态并在单试次中进行分析，以估计意向性绑定是否与早期神经过程相关。此外，我们对冥想者和非冥想者之间不同的行为表现感兴趣，因为预计冥想者能够更持续地将注意力集中在一项任务上。因此，我们对20名正念冥想者进行了意向性绑定范式实验，并将他们与匹配的对照组进行比较。虽然我们在行为数据或EEG记录上均未观察到组间效应，但我们发现，与正电位相比，在慢皮层电位（SCPs）持续负向偏转之后的自我发起动作会产生更强的绑定效应，特别是在对后续效果的感知时间方面。我们的结果提供了首个直接证据，表明SCPs范围内的早期神经活动会影响由意向动作导致的感觉结果的感知时间。
