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 th..., The behavioural data on healthy human participants was obtained through the online platform Prolific. 
, , # Codes and data

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.47d7wm3rb](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.47d7wm3rb)

### Description of the data and file structure

The file is stored in MATLAB (.mat) format. See dataframe.mat

#### There are 34 fields under the structure of \"dataframe.mat\"

Each field contains trial data for 219 participants (one participant per one cell). Each cell contains all trials data for the corresponding participant. 

Important fields that were used to generate figures are:

* \"**iBlock**\": the number of blocks; 1 (baseline block) or block 2 (test block)
* \"**grp**\": group; 1 (control group), 2 (no instruction group) or 3 (instruction group)
* \"**point2**\": trial success; 1 (successfully avoided birds) or 0 (failed)
* \"**wt**\": wait time until a key response in second 
* \"**wtbin2**\": the interval the participants selected; 1 (early), 2 (middle) or 3 (late interval)
* \"**bet**\": the interval the competitor selected; 1 (early), 2 (middle) or 3 (late interval)

## Code/softwar..., , **Changes after Dec 6, 2025:** comments for parameters of models added to files \"Step3_LaggedRegression_model.m\" and \"gen_models_exto.m\"