Consciousness and Cognition 27 (2014) 231–232
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Commentary
Experimental control: What does it mean for a participant to ‘feel free’? q Felicity Callard a,⇑, Des Fitzgerald b a b
Department of Geography, Lower Mountjoy, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
In 2002, Jack and Roepstorff argued for a ‘re-valuation of the standard ‘‘cognitive mapping’’ paradigm’ in which neuroscientists would reclaim retrospective participant reports from their exile beyond psychology’s perimeters and (re)install them in their rightful place alongside behavioural and brain imaging data (Jack & Roepstorff, 2002). They noted that the ‘experiences of the actual subjects, whose objective data are . . . reported at length, are rarely probed at all’: it was time for experimental subjects to be given the opportunity ‘to answer back, as it were’, and for experimenters to ‘allow them to describe the role they actually played and the experiences they had of playing it’. Such perspectives have been prominent for some time in the history of psychology (Danziger, 1994). Nonetheless, Jack and Roepstorff’s important intervention (see also Jack & Roepstorff, 2003, 2004) has had limited success in changing the implicit assumptions (or lack of assumptions) about the actual content of subjective experience, and its role in how we should interpret and use neuroimaging data. If scientists do acknowledge that research participants will have their own assessments of what is going on in an experiment, most have avoided addressing this problematic directly. Experimenters have largely continued to work with paradigms wherein the phenomenon in question is translated into tightly defined and constrained tasks, and the complex ‘subjective experience’ of the task, from the perspective of the experimental subject, can be put out of mind. In other words, much Kuhnian ‘normal science’ in neuroimaging proceeds by giving the experimenter a monopoly on interpretive power: she defines the construct under investigation; determines how to operationalize the construct behaviourally; and determines what the subject’s behavioural responses mean in relation to the construct being investigated. This practice follows a well-established operating procedure developed in experimental psychology in the early twentieth century. On that model, as the historian of psychology Morawski puts it, ‘Subjects were rendered anonymous and purportedly passive actors whose thoughts and ‘behaviors’ have been represented almost exclusively through experimenters’ terms’ (Morawski, 2007). It remains relatively uncommon for neuroscientists to open up the ‘black box’ of subjective experience in experimental paradigms explicitly, and thus to assess how well (if at all) the experimenter’s (or her discipline’s) own definition and behavioural operationalization of the construct under investigation maps on to the participant’s (‘subjective’) experience during the experimental elicitation of behavioural data. The production of an ‘objective’ data-set, then, is premised on a partial, limited interpretive frame – the phenomenology of a subject’s experience is carefully excluded from the science of that subject’s mind (cf. experiments with phenomenology e.g. Gallagher & Brøsted Sørensen, 2006). These are precisely the questions that Filevich and colleagues have opened up (Filevich et al., 2013). They have done so in relation to one of the most complex and contested sites of interest within cognitive neuroscience and philosophy – that of ‘free will’ (and the closely related domains of ‘free choice’ and ‘voluntary action’). They creatively expand upon the existing large literature via a new paradigm (which ran parallel to the usual means of investigating instructed and free choice via instructions provided via external cues). Participants were offered the possibility q Commentary on Filevich, E., Vanneste, P., Brass, M., Fias, W., Haggard, P., & Kühn, S. (2013). Brain correlates of subjective freedom of choice. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1271–1284. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.08.011. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (F. Callard), des.fi[email protected] (D. Fitzgerald).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.05.008 1053-8100/Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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F. Callard, D. Fitzgerald / Consciousness and Cognition 27 (2014) 231–232
of both experiencing and reporting on what the authors call a ‘graded sense of free choice’ via a random sequence generating exercise, in which certain sequences are likely to provoke the experience of relative constraint, and others the experience of relative freedom. Notably, the experimenters did not directly manipulate the construct of voluntariness, but rather assumed that participants’ own assessments (via ‘introspection’) of their experiences of graded free choice could be a reliable means of assessing this experience. By refusing to assume which conditions are associated with the ‘voluntary’ and which with the ‘constrained’, the experimenters aimed to ‘distil the bases of the feelings of voluntariness independently from any preconceptions from the experimenter’s part’. Filevich et al. argue that their data suggest that the phenomenal experience of voluntariness may well be dissociated from brain circuits involved in action selection. Their study thereby challenges many of the implicit assumptions underpinning experiments investigating voluntary action, by intimating that such ‘voluntary’ actions may well not be subjectively experienced as such. Even more significantly, their experiment dissolves the tight bond commonly assumed between voluntariness (and/or ‘freedom’) and choice as understood as selection from a wide number of available alternatives. They conjecture that the experience of voluntariness (‘feeling free’ as reported by participants) appears to be associated with ‘how strongly the environment is interpreted as precluding otherwise available alternatives’ and not with the number of available alternatives. One interesting consequence that follows is that ‘choosing’ from a range of alternatives might, contra many experimental designs, be experienced as ‘constraint’ rather than ‘freedom’ (an argument that, incidentally, has also been powerfully made in other disciplines, e.g. Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). While the authors offer cogent interpretations of what might be going on when the participants selected, in the ‘subjective’ part of the task, a sense of being less or more ‘free’ on the visual analogue scale, there is further scope to analyse what exactly ‘feels free’ and ‘feels instructed’ might be within the strange confines of an experiment. In many ways, this is a strength of the study: the authors remain relatively agnostic about what the experiment is probing. Of course the graded sense of ‘free choice’ that the participants are offered is a relative one: the participants are still subject to an experimental setting in which they are caught up in a host of consciously and (perhaps) implicitly felt constraints about the roles available to them. In other words – and perhaps more troublingly – there are still multiple prompts and scripts vis-à-vis appropriate participant conduct, even if the experimenter wishes to relinquish her power to determine the operationalization and interpretation of the construct under scrutiny. In some ways, then, the experimenter is only another participant in the game of interpretive constraint: she may have no throne to abdicate. It would thus be instructive to hear more from the participants in this experiment about ‘the role they actually played, and the experiences they had of playing it’ – which may yet illuminate the questions of what ‘feeling free’ might mean. This paper deserves a wide readership amongst all those interested in ecologically rich data about complex relations between acting, and ‘feelings’ of acting, in social situations. The paper leaves us with the hard puzzle of how further to investigate ‘feeling free’ psychologically and neuronally, and gives new vigour to a field – the neuroscience of ‘free will’ and ‘voluntariness’ – that at times can feel more sclerotic than liberated. Acknowledgements Both authors acknowledge an award from the Volkswagen Foundation’s Second European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences and Humanities. Felicity Callard’s research for this commentary has been supported by two Wellcome Trust Strategic Awards to Durham University (WT086049 and WT098455MA). Des Fitzgerald’s research has been supported by an ESRC (UK) Transformative grant on ‘A New Sociology for a New Century’ (ES/L003074/1). References Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London; New York: Verso. Danziger, K. (1994). Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Filevich, E., Vanneste, P., Brass, M., Fias, W., Haggard, P., & Kühn, S. (2013). Brain correlates of subjective freedom of choice. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1271–1284. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.08.011. Gallagher, S., & Brøsted Sørensen, J. (2006). Experimenting with phenomenology. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(1), 119–134. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.concog.2005.03.002. Jack, A., & Roepstorff, A. (2002). Introspection and cognitive brain mapping: From stimulus-response to script-report. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(8), 333–339. Jack, A., & Roepstorff, A. (Eds.). (2003). Trusting the subject? The use of introspective evidence in cognitive science (Vol. 1). Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Jack, A., & Roepstorff, A. (Eds.). (2004). Trusting the subject? The use of introspective evidence in cognitive science (Vol. 2). Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Morawski, J. (2007). Scientific selves: discerning the subject and the experimenter in experimental psychology in the United States, 1900–1935. In M. G. Ash & T. Sturm (Eds.), Psychology’s Territories: Historical and contemporary perspectives from different disciplines (pp. 129–148). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Commentary
Experimental control: What does it mean for a participant to ‘feel free’? q Felicity Callard a,⇑, Des Fitzgerald b a b
Department of Geography, Lower Mountjoy, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
In 2002, Jack and Roepstorff argued for a ‘re-valuation of the standard ‘‘cognitive mapping’’ paradigm’ in which neuroscientists would reclaim retrospective participant reports from their exile beyond psychology’s perimeters and (re)install them in their rightful place alongside behavioural and brain imaging data (Jack & Roepstorff, 2002). They noted that the ‘experiences of the actual subjects, whose objective data are . . . reported at length, are rarely probed at all’: it was time for experimental subjects to be given the opportunity ‘to answer back, as it were’, and for experimenters to ‘allow them to describe the role they actually played and the experiences they had of playing it’. Such perspectives have been prominent for some time in the history of psychology (Danziger, 1994). Nonetheless, Jack and Roepstorff’s important intervention (see also Jack & Roepstorff, 2003, 2004) has had limited success in changing the implicit assumptions (or lack of assumptions) about the actual content of subjective experience, and its role in how we should interpret and use neuroimaging data. If scientists do acknowledge that research participants will have their own assessments of what is going on in an experiment, most have avoided addressing this problematic directly. Experimenters have largely continued to work with paradigms wherein the phenomenon in question is translated into tightly defined and constrained tasks, and the complex ‘subjective experience’ of the task, from the perspective of the experimental subject, can be put out of mind. In other words, much Kuhnian ‘normal science’ in neuroimaging proceeds by giving the experimenter a monopoly on interpretive power: she defines the construct under investigation; determines how to operationalize the construct behaviourally; and determines what the subject’s behavioural responses mean in relation to the construct being investigated. This practice follows a well-established operating procedure developed in experimental psychology in the early twentieth century. On that model, as the historian of psychology Morawski puts it, ‘Subjects were rendered anonymous and purportedly passive actors whose thoughts and ‘behaviors’ have been represented almost exclusively through experimenters’ terms’ (Morawski, 2007). It remains relatively uncommon for neuroscientists to open up the ‘black box’ of subjective experience in experimental paradigms explicitly, and thus to assess how well (if at all) the experimenter’s (or her discipline’s) own definition and behavioural operationalization of the construct under investigation maps on to the participant’s (‘subjective’) experience during the experimental elicitation of behavioural data. The production of an ‘objective’ data-set, then, is premised on a partial, limited interpretive frame – the phenomenology of a subject’s experience is carefully excluded from the science of that subject’s mind (cf. experiments with phenomenology e.g. Gallagher & Brøsted Sørensen, 2006). These are precisely the questions that Filevich and colleagues have opened up (Filevich et al., 2013). They have done so in relation to one of the most complex and contested sites of interest within cognitive neuroscience and philosophy – that of ‘free will’ (and the closely related domains of ‘free choice’ and ‘voluntary action’). They creatively expand upon the existing large literature via a new paradigm (which ran parallel to the usual means of investigating instructed and free choice via instructions provided via external cues). Participants were offered the possibility q Commentary on Filevich, E., Vanneste, P., Brass, M., Fias, W., Haggard, P., & Kühn, S. (2013). Brain correlates of subjective freedom of choice. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1271–1284. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.08.011. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (F. Callard), des.fi[email protected] (D. Fitzgerald).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.05.008 1053-8100/Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
232
F. Callard, D. Fitzgerald / Consciousness and Cognition 27 (2014) 231–232
of both experiencing and reporting on what the authors call a ‘graded sense of free choice’ via a random sequence generating exercise, in which certain sequences are likely to provoke the experience of relative constraint, and others the experience of relative freedom. Notably, the experimenters did not directly manipulate the construct of voluntariness, but rather assumed that participants’ own assessments (via ‘introspection’) of their experiences of graded free choice could be a reliable means of assessing this experience. By refusing to assume which conditions are associated with the ‘voluntary’ and which with the ‘constrained’, the experimenters aimed to ‘distil the bases of the feelings of voluntariness independently from any preconceptions from the experimenter’s part’. Filevich et al. argue that their data suggest that the phenomenal experience of voluntariness may well be dissociated from brain circuits involved in action selection. Their study thereby challenges many of the implicit assumptions underpinning experiments investigating voluntary action, by intimating that such ‘voluntary’ actions may well not be subjectively experienced as such. Even more significantly, their experiment dissolves the tight bond commonly assumed between voluntariness (and/or ‘freedom’) and choice as understood as selection from a wide number of available alternatives. They conjecture that the experience of voluntariness (‘feeling free’ as reported by participants) appears to be associated with ‘how strongly the environment is interpreted as precluding otherwise available alternatives’ and not with the number of available alternatives. One interesting consequence that follows is that ‘choosing’ from a range of alternatives might, contra many experimental designs, be experienced as ‘constraint’ rather than ‘freedom’ (an argument that, incidentally, has also been powerfully made in other disciplines, e.g. Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). While the authors offer cogent interpretations of what might be going on when the participants selected, in the ‘subjective’ part of the task, a sense of being less or more ‘free’ on the visual analogue scale, there is further scope to analyse what exactly ‘feels free’ and ‘feels instructed’ might be within the strange confines of an experiment. In many ways, this is a strength of the study: the authors remain relatively agnostic about what the experiment is probing. Of course the graded sense of ‘free choice’ that the participants are offered is a relative one: the participants are still subject to an experimental setting in which they are caught up in a host of consciously and (perhaps) implicitly felt constraints about the roles available to them. In other words – and perhaps more troublingly – there are still multiple prompts and scripts vis-à-vis appropriate participant conduct, even if the experimenter wishes to relinquish her power to determine the operationalization and interpretation of the construct under scrutiny. In some ways, then, the experimenter is only another participant in the game of interpretive constraint: she may have no throne to abdicate. It would thus be instructive to hear more from the participants in this experiment about ‘the role they actually played, and the experiences they had of playing it’ – which may yet illuminate the questions of what ‘feeling free’ might mean. This paper deserves a wide readership amongst all those interested in ecologically rich data about complex relations between acting, and ‘feelings’ of acting, in social situations. The paper leaves us with the hard puzzle of how further to investigate ‘feeling free’ psychologically and neuronally, and gives new vigour to a field – the neuroscience of ‘free will’ and ‘voluntariness’ – that at times can feel more sclerotic than liberated. Acknowledgements Both authors acknowledge an award from the Volkswagen Foundation’s Second European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences and Humanities. Felicity Callard’s research for this commentary has been supported by two Wellcome Trust Strategic Awards to Durham University (WT086049 and WT098455MA). Des Fitzgerald’s research has been supported by an ESRC (UK) Transformative grant on ‘A New Sociology for a New Century’ (ES/L003074/1). References Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London; New York: Verso. Danziger, K. (1994). Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Filevich, E., Vanneste, P., Brass, M., Fias, W., Haggard, P., & Kühn, S. (2013). Brain correlates of subjective freedom of choice. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1271–1284. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.08.011. Gallagher, S., & Brøsted Sørensen, J. (2006). Experimenting with phenomenology. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(1), 119–134. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.concog.2005.03.002. Jack, A., & Roepstorff, A. (2002). Introspection and cognitive brain mapping: From stimulus-response to script-report. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(8), 333–339. Jack, A., & Roepstorff, A. (Eds.). (2003). Trusting the subject? The use of introspective evidence in cognitive science (Vol. 1). Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Jack, A., & Roepstorff, A. (Eds.). (2004). Trusting the subject? The use of introspective evidence in cognitive science (Vol. 2). Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Morawski, J. (2007). Scientific selves: discerning the subject and the experimenter in experimental psychology in the United States, 1900–1935. In M. G. Ash & T. Sturm (Eds.), Psychology’s Territories: Historical and contemporary perspectives from different disciplines (pp. 129–148). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
