PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - U. Maoz AU - G. Yaffe AU - C. Koch AU - L. Mudrik TI - Neural precursors of decisions that matter—an ERP study of deliberate and arbitrary choice AID - 10.1101/097626 DP - 2018 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 097626 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/02/097626.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/02/097626.full AB - 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 has been taken by some as evidence against a causal role for consciousness in human decision making and thus as a denial of free-will. Yet those studies focused on purposeless, unreasoned, arbitrary decisions, bereft of consequences. It remains unknown to what degree these specific neural precursors of action generalize to deliberate decisions, which are more ecological and relevant to real life. We therefore directly compared the neural correlates of deliberate and arbitrary decision-making during a $1000-donation task to non-profit organizations among subjects prescreened for social involvement. While we found the expected RPs for arbitrary decisions, they were strikingly absent for deliberate ones. Our results and a drift-diffusion model we constructed are congruent with the RP representing the accumulation of noisy, random fluctuations, which drive arbitrary—but not deliberate—decisions. The absence of RPs in deliberate decisions further points to different neural mechanisms underlying deliberate and arbitrary decisions and thus challenges the generalizability of studies that argue for no causal role for consciousness in decision making from arbitrary to deliberate, real-life decisions.