Establishing causal beliefs by observing regularities between actions and events in the environment is a crucial part of goal-directed behavior. Sense of agency (SoA) describes the corresponding experience of generating and controlling actions and subsequent events. Investigating how SoA adapts to situational changes in action-effect contingency, we observed even singular disturbances of perfect action-effect contingencies to yield a striking impact on SoA formation. Moreover, we additionally included disturbances of regularity that are not directly linked to one's own actions. Doing so allowed us to investigate how SoA might be a concept that goes beyond own actions towards a more generalized, subjective representation of control regarding environmental events. Indeed, the present experiments establish that, while SoA is highly tuned toward action-effect relations, it is also sensitive to events that occur without one's own action contribution. SoA thus appears to be exceptionally sensitive to singular breakpoints of perfect control with agents disproportionally incorporating such events during SoA formation while at the same time building on a rich situation model.

In the last years, it has become general consensus that actions change our time perception. Performing an action to elicit a specific event seems to lead to a systematic underestimation of the interval between action and effect, a phenomenon termed temporal (or previously intentional) binding. Temporal binding has been closely associated with sense of agency, our perceived control over our actions and our environment, and because of its robust behavioral effects has indeed been widely utilized as an implicit correlate of sense of agency. The most robust and clear temporal binding effects are typically found via Libet clock paradigms. In the present study, we investigate a crucial methodological confound in these paradigms that provides an alternative explanation for temporal binding effects: a redirection of attentional resources in two-event-sequences (as in classical operant conditions) versus singular events (as in classical baseline conditions). Our results indicate that binding effects in Libet clock paradigms may be based to a large degree on such attentional processes, irrespective of intention or action-effect sequences. Thus, these findings challenge many of the previously drawn conclusions and interpretations with regards to actions and time perception.

Distributing complex actions across agents is commonplace in human society. The objective efficiency of joint actions comes with critical challenges for the sense of agency of individual agents, complicating an accurate formation of these agents' perceived control over actions and action outcomes. Here we report a new experimental paradigm to investigate sense of agency for supervisors and subordinates in hierarchical settings. Results indicate profound differences in the sense of agency between both roles, while also indicating additional contributions of such situational factors as degrees of freedom, action decision vs. action execution, outcome valence, and veto options. We further observed a tight coupling of sense of agency and sense of responsibility, with only weak links to affective responses to the action outcome.

Voluntary actions are accompanied by a sense of control over this action and its effects. Forming an appropriate sense of control (or sense of agency) has widespread consequences of individual and societal relevance. Moreover, perceived control might serve as a powerful action motivator, although this critical function has been addressed scarcely so far. Thus, in two experiments (N = 101 adults for each study), we directly examined the value of control for human agents by allowing participants to choose between financial gain and situational control. Crucially, a significant share of participants chose to be in control even when this option was less financially rewarding. That is, participants had to be offered 66% (Study 1) and 34% (Study 2) of expected asset earnings as an additional reward to make them predictably waive control. In addition to the value of objective decision rights, we also measured subjectively perceived control. This is a further extension of prior research as similar levels of objective control can lead to substantially different subjective feelings of control. Hereby, we found a share of the participants to create an illusionary sense of agency in situations of little objective control. These results portray perceived control as a powerful motivator for human behavior that comes with a unique and quantifiable value for individual agents.

Repeatedly encountering a stimulus biases the observer's affective response and evaluation of the stimuli. Here we provide evidence for a causal link between mere exposure to fictitious news reports and subsequent voting behavior. In four preregistered online experiments, participants browsed through newspaper webpages and were tacitly exposed to names of fictitious politicians. Exposure predicted voting behavior in a subsequent mock election, with a consistent preference for frequent over infrequent names, except when news items were decidedly negative. Follow-up analyses indicated that mere media presence fuels implicit personality theories regarding a candidate’s vigor in political contexts. News outlets should therefore be mindful to cover political candidates as evenly as possible.

Human action control is highly sensitive to action-effect contingencies in the agent's environment. Here we show that the subjective sense of agency (SoA) contributes to this sensitivity as a subjective counterpart to instrumental action decisions. Participants (N = 556) experienced varying reward probabilities and were prompted to give summary evaluations of their SoA after a series of action-effect episodes. Results first revealed a quadratic relation of contingency and SoA, driven by a disproportionally strong impact of perfect action-effect contingencies. In addition to this strong situational determinant of SoA, we observed small but reliable interindividual differences as a function of gender, assertiveness, and neuroticism that applied especially at imperfect action-effect contingencies. Crucially, SoA not only reflected the reward structure of the environment but was also associated with the agent's future action decisions across situational and personal factors. These findings call for a paradigm shift in research on perceived agency, away from the retrospective assessment of single behavioral episodes and towards a prospective view that draws on statistical regularities of an agent's environment.

The human cognitive system houses efficient mechanisms to monitor ongoing actions. Upon detecting an erroneous course of action, these mechanisms are commonly assumed to adjust cognitive processing to mitigate the error's consequences and to prevent future action slips. Here we demonstrate that error detection has far earlier consequences by feeding back directly onto ongoing motor activity, thus cancelling erroneous movements immediately. We tested this prediction of immediate auto-correction by analyzing how the force of correct and erroneous keypress actions evolves over time while controlling for cognitive and biomechanical constraints relating to response time and the peak force of a movement. We conclude that the force profiles are indicative of active cancellation by showing indications of shorter response durations for errors already within the first 100 ms, i.e., between the onset and the peak of the response, a timescale that has previously been related solely to error detection. This effect increased in a late phase of responding, i.e., after after response force peaked until its offset, further corroborating that it indeed reflects cancellation efforts instead of consequences of planning or initiating the error.

Research on the sense of agency has proliferated a range of explicit and implicit measures. However, the relation of different measures is poorly understood with especially mixed findings on the correlation between explicit judgments of agency and the implicit perceptual bias of temporal binding. Here, we add to the conundrum by showing that the two sub-components of temporal binding - action-binding and effect-binding, respectively - are not correlated across participants either, suggesting independent processes for both components. Research on inter-individual differences regarding the sense of agency is thus well-advised to rely on other implicit measures until the phenomenon of temporal binding is better understood.

Human agents draw on a variety of explicit and implicit cues to construct a sense of agency for their actions and the effects that these actions have on the outside world. Associative mechanisms binding actions to their immediate effects support the evolution of agency for operant actions. However, human agents also often act to prevent a certain event from occurring. Such prevention behavior poses a critical challenge for the sense of agency as successful prevention inherently revolves around the absence of a perceivable effect. By assessing the psychological microstructure of singular operant and prevention actions we show that this comes with profound consequences: agency for prevention actions is only evident in explicit but not in implicit measures. These findings attest to an altered action representation in prevention behavior and support recent proposals to model related processes such as avoidance learning in terms of propositional rather than associative terms.

Several law systems punish nonactions such as failures to render assistance, although it is unknown if people spontaneously experience a sense of authorship for the consequences of their not acting. Here we provide evidence that events caused by deliberate choices not to act can indeed give rise to a vivid sense of agency. In three experiments, participants reported a sense of agency for events following nonactions and, crucially, temporal binding between nonactions and subsequent consequences suggested a sense of agency for nonactions even at an implicit level. These findings indicate that a sense of agency is not confined to overt body movements. At the same time, agency was more pronounced when the same event resulted from an action rather than being the consequence of a nonaction, highlighting the importance of ascribing different degrees of responsibility for the consequences of acting and not acting.

The sense of agency, i.e., the notion that we as agents are in control of our own actions and can affect our environment by acting, is an integral part of human volition. Recent work has attempted to ground agency in basic mechanisms of human action control. Along these lines, action-effect binding has been shown to affect explicit judgments of agency. Here, we investigate if such action-effect bindings are also related to temporal binding which is often used as an implicit measure of agency. In two experiments, we found evidence for the establishment of short-term action-effect bindings as well as temporal binding effects. However, the two phenomena were not associated with each other. This finding suggests that the relation of action control and agency is not a simple one, and it adds to the evidence in favor of a dissociation between subjective agency and perceptual biases such as temporal binding.

The sense of agency, i.e., the feeling of control over one's own actions and their consequences in the environment, is a crucial part of action taking. In experimental studies, agency is most commonly measured either directly via explicit agency ratings or indirectly via implicit measures, e.g., temporal binding. In order to aid our interpretation of previous and future results, several studies have focused on relating implicit and explicit measures of agency to one another. However, possibly due to different methodological issues, results have been far from conclusive. In the present study, we therefore contribute to this discussion by further characterizing temporal binding and explicit agency ratings in their response to action choice as an experimental manipulation in a high-powered design, and by studying how temporal binding and agency ratings are related in different experimental conditions. Furthermore, we discuss the possible influence of the specific agency question regarding the participants' ratings.

Stereotypes are abundant in everyday life – and whereas their influence on cognitive and motor performance is well documented, a causal role in pain processing is still elusive. Nevertheless, previous studies have implicated gender-related stereotype effects in pain perception as potential mediators partly accounting for sex effects on pain. An influence of stereotypes on pain seems indeed likely as pain measures have proven especially susceptible to expectancy effects such as placebo effects. However, so far empirical approaches to stereotype effects on pain are correlational rather than experimental. In this study, we aimed at documenting gender-related stereotypes on pain perception and processing by actively manipulating the participants' awareness of common stereotypical expectations. We discovered that gender-related stereotypes can significantly modulate pain perception which was mirrored by activity levels in pain-associated brain areas.

Deliberate rule violations have typically been addressed from a motivational perspective that asked whether or not agents decide to violate rules based on contextual factors and moral considerations. Here we complement motivational approaches by providing a cognitive perspective on the processes that operate during the act of committing an unsolicited rule violation. Participants were tested in a task that allowed for violating traffic rules by exploiting forbidden shortcuts in a virtual city maze. Results yielded evidence for sustained cognitive conflict that affected performance from right before a violation throughout actually committing the violation. These findings open up a new theoretical perspective on violation behavior that focuses on processes occurring right at the moment a rule violation takes place.

We often ask other people to carry out actions for us in order to reach our goals. However, these commanded actions may sometimes go awry, and goal attainment is hindered by errors of the following person. Here, we investigated how the commanding person processes these errors of their follower. Because such errors indicate that the original goal of the command is not met, error processing for these actions should be enhanced compared to passively observing another person's actions. Participants thus either commanded another agent to perform one of four key press responses or they passively observed the agent responding. The agent could respond correctly or commit an error in either case. We compared error processing of commanded and passively observed actions using observation-related post-error slowing (oPES) as a behavioral marker and observed-error-related negativity (oNE/oERN) and observed-error positivity (oPE) as electrophysiological markers. Whereas error processing, as measured via the oERN, was similarly pronounced for commanded and observed actions, commanded actions gave rise to stronger oPES and a stronger oPE. These results suggest that enhanced monitoring is an automatic by-product of commanding another person's actions.

Anticipated action effects have been shown to govern action selection and initiation, as described in ideomotor theory, and they have also been demonstrated to determine crosstalk between different tasks in multitasking studies. Such effect-based crosstalk was observed not only in a forward manner (with a first task influencing performance in a following second task) but also in a backward manner (the second task influencing the preceding first task), suggesting that action effect codes can become activated prior to a capacity-limited processing stage often denoted as response selection. The process of effect-based response production, by contrast, has been proposed to be capacity-limited. These observations jointly suggest that effect code activation can occur independently of effect-based response production, though this theoretical implication has not been tested directly at present. We tested this hypothesis by employing a dual-task set-up in which we manipulated the ease of effect-based response production (via response-effect compatibility) in an experimental design that allows for observing forward and backward crosstalk. We observed robust crosstalk effects and response-effect compatibility effects alike, but no interaction between both effects. These results indicate that effect activation can occur in parallel for several tasks, independently of effect-based response production, which is confined to one task at a time.

Sensory consequences of an agent's actions are perceived less intensely than sensory stimuli that are not caused (and thus not predicted) by the observer. This effect of sensory attenuation has been discussed as a key principle of perception, potentially mediating various crucial functions such as agency and the discrimination of self-caused sensory stimulation from stimuli caused by external factors. Precise models describe the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon across a variety of modalities, especially the auditory, tactile, and visual domain. Despite these strong claims, empirical evidence for sensory attenuation in the visual domain is surprisingly sparse and ambiguous. In the present article, we therefore aim to clarify the role of sensory attenuation for learned visual action effects. To this end, we present a comprehensive replication effort including three separate, high-powered experiments on sensory attenuation in the visual domain with one direct and two pre-registered, conceptual replication attempts of an influential study on this topic (Cardoso-Leite et al., 2010). Signal detection analyses were targeted to distinguish between true visual sensitivity and response bias. Contrary to previous assumptions and despite high statistical power, however, we found no evidence for sensory attenuation of learned visual action effects. Bayesian analyses further supported the null hypothesis of no effect, thus constraining theories that promote sensory attenuation as an immediate and necessary consequence of voluntary actions.

The sense of agency is a pervasive phenomenon that accompanies conscious acting and extends to the consequences of one's actions in the environment. Subjective feelings of agency are typically explained in terms of predictive processes, based on internal forward models inherent to the sensorimotor system, and postdictive processes, i.e., explicit, retrospective judgments by the agent. Only recently, research has begun to elucidate the link between sense of agency and more basic processes of human action control. The present study was conducted in this spirit and explored the relation between short-term action-effect binding and explicit agency judgments. We found evidence for such a link in that the participants' short-term action-effect binding predicted subsequent agency ratings. This offers a new perspective on the sense of agency, providing an additional mechanism (together with predictive and postdictive processes) that may underlie its formation.

The late 18th century was a remarkable period for psychology. This was especially true for the Prince-Bishopric of Münster, Germany, where a new era dawned with an extensive political, economic, and educational reform which would ultimately lead to the establishment of psychology as an independent discipline at the newly founded University of Münster. But were these developments groundbreaking enough to advocate for pre-dating the beginnings of scientific psychology?

Computer games have been proposed as effective tools for cognitive enhancement. Especially first-person shooter (FPS) games have been found to yield a range of positive effects, and these positive effects also apply to the domain of executive functioning. Only a particular area of executive functioning has been shown to resist training via FPS games, and this area is task-switching performance. Here, we tested whether games of a different genre, real-time strategy (RTS) games, offer a more promising approach to improve task-switching performance, because RTS games capitalize on precisely this behavior. A high-powered, quasi-experimental comparison of RTS and FPS players indicated reliable costs for task-switching across both player groups – with similar performance on multiple indicators, comprising switch costs, mixing costs, voluntary switch rates, and psychological refractory period effects. Performance of both groups further did not exceed the performance of a control group of Chess and Go players. These results corroborate previous findings on the robustness of cognitive costs of task-switching. At the same time, our results also suggest that the precise characteristics of different computer games might not be critical in determining potential training effects.

Sensory stimuli resulting from one's own actions are perceptually attenuated compared to identical but externally produced stimuli. This may enable the organism to discriminate between self-produced events and events caused by the environment, suggesting a strong link between sensory attenuation and a subjective sense of agency. To investigate this supposed link, we compared the influence of filled and unfilled action-effect delays on both, judgements of agency for self-produced sounds and attenuation of the event-related potential (ERP). In line with previous findings, judgments of agency differed between both delay conditions with higher ratings for filled than for unfilled delays. Sensory attenuation, however, was not influenced by filling the delay. These findings indicate a partial dissociation of the two phenomena.

Patient studies provide insights into mechanisms underlying diseases and thus represent a cornerstone of clinical research. In this study, we report evidence that differences between patients and controls might partly be based on expectations generated by the patients' knowledge of being invited and treated as a patient: the Being a Patient effect (BP effect). This finding extends previous neuropsychological reports on diagnosis threat. Participants with mild allergies were addressed either as patients or control subjects in a clinical study. We measured the impact of this group labeling and corresponding instructions on pain perception and cognitive performance. Our results provide evidence that the BP effect can indeed affect physiological and cognitive measures in clinical settings. Importantly, these effects can lead to systematic overestimation of genuine disease effects and should be taken into account when disease effects are investigated. Finally, we propose strategies to avoid or minimize this critical confound.

When observing another agent performing simple actions, these actions are systematically remembered as one's own after a brief period of time. Such "observation inflation" has been documented as a robust phenomenon in studies in which participants passively observed videotaped actions. Whether observation inflation also holds for direct, face-to-face interactions is an open question that we addressed in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants commanded the experimenter to carry out certain actions, and they indeed reported false memories of self-performance in a later memory test. The effect size of this inflation effect was similar to passive observation as confirmed by Experiment 2. These findings suggest that observation inflation might affect action memory in a broad range of real-world interactions.

The feeling of being watched has several well-documented consequences, from social facilitation to the induction of pro-social behavior. Even though the effects of being watched have long been in the focus of scientific interest, it remains unclear which features determine the actual subjective feeling of being watched. We report two experiments to approach this question. Participants were confronted with pictures showing the faces of different creatures while imagining being in an embarrassing situation. Participants rated for each creature in each situation how strongly they felt watched and how much ability they ascribed to the creature to reflect on the situation. A between-experiment manipulation of how much ability was ascribed to a particular creature further probed for a causal relation between the two variables. Results confirmed that the creature's ascribed ability to reflect on the situation is a key component that determines the feeling of being watched in humans.

Classic findings on conformity and obedience document a strong and automatic drive of human agents to follow any type of rule or social norm. At the same time, most individuals tend to violate rules on occasion, and such deliberate rule violations have recently been shown to yield cognitive conflict for the rule-breaker. These findings indicate persistent difficulty to suppress the rule representation, even though rule violations were studied in a controlled experimental setting with neither gains nor possible sanctions for violators. In the current study, we validate these findings by showing that convicted criminals, i.e., individuals with a history of habitual and severe forms of rule violations, can free themselves from such cognitive conflict in a similarly controlled laboratory task. These findings support an emerging view that aims at understanding rule violations from the perspective of the violating agent rather than from the perspective of outside observer.

Expectancy effects are a widespread phenomenon, and they come with a lasting influence on cognitive operations, from basic stimulus processing to higher cognitive functions. Their impact is often profound and behaviorally significant, as evidenced by an enormous body of literature investigating the characteristics and possible processes underlying expectancy effects. The literature on this topic spans diverse fields, from clinical psychology to cognitive neuroscience, and from social psychology to behavioral biology. We present an emerging perspective on these diverse phenomena and show how this perspective stimulates new toeholds for investigation, provides insight in underlying mechanisms, improves awareness of methodological confounds, and can lead to a deeper understanding of the effects of expectations on a broad spectrum of cognitive processes.

As early as 1783, the almost forgotten philosopher, metaphysicist, and psychologist Ferdinand Ueberwasser (1752-1812), designated himself "Professor für empirische Psychologie und Logik", professor of empirical psychology and logic, at the University of Münster, Germany. His position was initiated and supported by the minister and educational reformer Franz von Fürstenberg (1729-1810), who considered psychology a core scientific discipline, to be taught at each school and university. At the end of the 18th century, then, psychology seems to have been on the verge of becoming an independent academic discipline, about 100 years before Wilhelm Wundt founded the discipline's first official laboratory. It seems surprising that Ueberwasser's writings – including a seminal textbook on empirical psychology – have been almost entirely overlooked by most historical accounts. We focus on this important founding moment of psychological science, and on the circumstances that eventually brought this seminal development to a halt.

Rule compliance is pivotal for the regulation of social behavior. Still, humans deliberately violate rules at times – be it for personal reasons or for a higher good. Whereas previous research has studied the preconditions and consequences of rule violations, essentially nothing is known about the cognitive processes right at the moment a rule violation takes place. Here we show that merely labeling an action as rule violation induces substantial conflict between rule violation and compliance, as revealed by participants' bias towards rule-complying motor actions. Moreover, conflict that comes with violating a rule was much stronger than conflict that comes with following an alternative rule, even if both decisions result in the same observable behavior. These observations open a new theoretical perspective on rule violation behavior, shifting the focus toward the cognitive processes operating during the very act of rule violation.

Humans follow rules by default, and violating even simple rules induces cognitive conflict for the rule breaker. Previous studies revealed this conflict in various behavioral measures, including response times and movement trajectories. Based on these experiments, we investigated the electrophysiological signature of deliberately violating a simple stimulus-response mapping rule. Such rule violations were characterized by a delayed and attenuated P300 component when evaluating the stimulus prompting the behavior, most likely reflecting increased response complexity. This parietal attenuation was followed by a frontal positivity for rule violations relative to correct response trials. Together, these results reinforce previous findings on the need to inhibit automatic S-R translation when committing a rule violation, and they point towards additional factors involved in rule violation. Candidate processes such as negative emotional responses and increased monitoring should be targeted by future empirical investigations.

Evidence indicates that hormones modulate the intensity of maternal care. Oxytocin is known for its positive influence on maternal behavior and its important role for childbirth. In contrast, testosterone promotes egocentric choices and reduces empathy. Further, testosterone decreases during parenthood which could be an adaptation to increased parental investment. The present study investigated the interaction between testosterone and oxytocin in attentional control and their influence on attention to baby schema in women. Higher endogenous testosterone was expected to decrease selective attention to child portraits in a face-in-the-crowd-paradigm, while oxytocin was expected to counteract this effect. As predicted, women with higher salivary testosterone were slower in orienting attention to infant targets in the context of adult distractors. Interestingly, reaction times to infant and adult stimuli decreased after oxytocin administration, but only in women with high endogenous testosterone. These results suggest that oxytocin may counteract the adverse effects of testosterone on a central aspect of social behavior and maternal caretaking.

The influence of positive or negative expectations on clinical outcomes such as pain relief or motor performance in patients and healthy participants has been extensively investigated for years. Such research promises potential benefit for patient treatment by deliberately using expectations as means to stimulate endogenous regulation processes. Especially regarding recent interest and controversies revolving around cognitive enhancement, the question remains whether mere expectancies might also yield enhancing or impairing effects in the cognitive domain, i.e., can we improve or impair cognitive performance simply by creating a strong expectancy in participants about their performance? Moreover, previous literature suggests that especially subjective perception is highly susceptible to expectancy effects, whereas objective measures can be affected in certain domains, but not in others. Does such a dissociation of objective measures and subjective perception also apply to cognitive placebo and nocebo effects? In this study, we sought to investigate whether placebo and nocebo effects can be evoked in cognitive tasks, and whether these effects influence objective and subjective measures alike. To this end, we instructed participants about alleged effects of different tone frequencies (high, intermediate, low) on brain activity and cognitive functions. We paired each tone with specific success rates in a Flanker task paradigm as a preliminary conditioning procedure, adapted from research on placebo hypoalgesia. In a subsequent test phase, we measured reaction times and success rates in different expectancy conditions (placebo, nocebo, and control) and then asked participants how the different tone frequencies affected their performance. Interestingly, we found no effects of expectation on objective measures, but a strong effect on subjective perception, i.e., although actual performance was not affected by expectancy, participants strongly believed that the placebo tone frequency improved their performance.

Our first impression of others is highly influenced by their facial appearance. However, the perception and evaluation of faces is not only guided by internal features such as facial expressions, but also highly dependent on contextual information such as secondhand information (verbal descriptions) about the target person. To investigate the time course of contextual influences on cortical face processing, event-related brain potentials were investigated in response to neutral faces, which were preceded by brief verbal descriptions containing cues of affective valence (negative, neutral, positive) and self-reference (self-related vs. other-related). ERP analysis demonstrated that early and late stages of face processing are enhanced by negative and positive as well as self-relevant descriptions, although faces per se did not differ perceptually. Affective ratings of the faces confirmed these findings. Altogether, these results demonstrate for the first time both on an electrocortical and behavioral level how contextual information modifies early visual perception in a top-down manner.

Perception and evaluation of facial expressions are known to be heavily modulated by emotional features of contextual information. Such contextual effects, however, might also be driven by non-emotional aspects of contextual information, an interaction of emotional and non-emotional factors, and by the observers' inherent traits. Therefore, we sought to assess whether contextual information about self-reference in addition to information about valence influences the evaluation and neural processing of neutral faces. Furthermore, we investigated whether social anxiety moderates these effects. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants viewed neutral facial expressions preceded by a contextual sentence conveying either positive or negative evaluations about the participant or about somebody else. Contextual influences were reflected in rating and fMRI measures, with strong effects of self-reference on brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and right fusiform gyrus. Additionally, social anxiety strongly affected the response to faces conveying negative, self-related evaluations as revealed by the participants' rating patterns and brain activity in cortical midline structures and regions of interest in the left and right middle frontal gyrus. These results suggest that face perception and processing are highly individual processes influenced by emotional and non-emotional aspects of contextual information and further modulated by individual personality traits.

Three different methods for extracting coefficients of linear regression analyses are presented. The focus is on automatic and easy-to-use approaches for common statistical packages: SPSS, R, and MS Excel / Libre Office Calc. Hands-on examples are included for each analysis, followed by a brief description of how a subsequent regression coefficient analysis is performed.

The impact of cognitive operations on haemodynamic activity in the human brain is a cornerstone of modern cognitive neuroscience. This essay presents an early speculation about why there is increased blood flow following cognitive operations: Emil Harleß, a 19th century German physiologist, proposed that this blood flow responds to irritations caused by "the will" in order to restore homeostasis. Peculiar from a modern perspective, this speculation shows how neuroscientific concepts and corresponding perspectives on cognitive function have changed over the centuries.