The effect of context and reason on the neural correlates of intentions

Sebo Uithol; Kai Görgen; Doris Pischedda; Ivan Toni; John-Dylan Haynes

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17231

The effect of context and reason on the neural correlates of intentions

Heliyon. 2023 Jun 15;9(6):e17231. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17231. eCollection 2023 Jun.

Authors

Sebo Uithol^{1

2

3}, Kai Görgen^{2

3}, Doris Pischedda^{2

3

4}, Ivan Toni⁵, John-Dylan Haynes^{2

3

6

7

8}

Affiliations

¹ Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute of Psychology & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands.
² Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
³ Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
⁴ Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy.
⁵ Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
⁶ Science of Intelligence, Research Cluster of Excellence, Berlin, Germany.
⁷ Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin School of Mind and Brain and Institute of Psychology, Berlin, Germany.
⁸ Technische Universität Dresden; SFB 940 Volition and Cognitive Control, Dresden, Germany.

Abstract

Many studies have identified networks in parietal and prefrontal cortex that are involved in intentional action. Yet, our understanding of the way these networks are involved in intentions is still very limited. In this study, we investigate two characteristics of these processes: context- and reason-dependence of the neural states associated with intentions. We ask whether these states depend on the context a person is in and the reasons they have for choosing an action. We used a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and multivariate decoding to directly assess the context- and reason-dependency of the neural states underlying intentions. We show that action intentions can be decoded from fMRI data based on a classifier trained in the same context and with the same reason, in line with previous decoding studies. Furthermore, we found that intentions can be decoded across different reasons for choosing an action. However, decoding across different contexts was not successful. We found anecdotal to moderate evidence against context-invariant information in all regions of interest and for all conditions but one. These results suggest that the neural states associated with intentions are modulated by the context of the action.

Keywords: Action selection; Context-dependence; Embodiment; Intentional action; MVPA; fMRI.