Data from: Freedom through understanding: Instructed knowledge shapes voluntary action choices

The capacity for voluntary action is a distinctive feature of human minds.
However, experimental studies of volition struggled to capture defining
features of human voluntariness. Here, we developed a competitive game
which incentivised participants to innovate their action choices to find
the right time to avoid a collision with an opponent who predicted the
timing of the participant’s action choice. One group of participants
received explicit information about the competitor’s action-selection
rules, while a second group had no information about the competitor. Both
groups showed increased behavioural stochasticity when adapting to a
competitor who punished participants’ choice biases. However, the group
that had no explicit information generated their action choices in a way
that avoided the action that the competitor was likely to take. In
contrast, the group that explicitly knew the competitor’s action-selection
rules avoided the same action they took in preceding trials so that the
competitor could not easily exploit the participant’s behavioural
patterns. These findings suggest that people can develop beliefs about
other agents in the social environment within which they work, and can
adapt voluntary action choices accordingly. However, explicit explanations
about the other agent facilitate model-based planning in the voluntary
generation of novel action patterns.