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J Neurophysiol 101: 1913-1920, 2009. First published January 21, 2009; doi:10.1152/jn.90994.2008
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The Neural Correlates of Intending Not to Do Something

Simone Kühn1,2, Wim Gevers2 and Marcel Brass2

1Department of Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; and 2Department of Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

Submitted 4 September 2008; accepted in final form 15 January 2009

There has been plenty of research concerning the representation of voluntary action in the human brain. However, the question of how we represent the voluntary omission of an action has been largely neglected. Therefore this study aimed at investigating the representation of intentionally not doing something by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). Free-choice nonactions elicit similar evoked potentials as free-choice actions and instructed actions (augmented P2 and attenuated N2), which leads us to assume that the voluntary intention, not the overt nonaction, is the characteristic feature of free-choice nonaction. Beyond that we reveal differences between free-choice nonactions and instructed nonactions that resemble the typical N2 and P3 augmentation usually seen for NoGo trials in Go/NoGo paradigms, with the difference that the free-choice nonaction ERP takes the place of the typical Go ERP.

Address for reprint requests and other correspondence: S. Kühn, Ghent University, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Department of Experimental Psychology, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Gent, Belgium (E-mail: skuehn{at}cbs.mpg.de)




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