Libet’s legacy: A primer to the neuroscience of volition

The neuroscience of volition is an emerging subfield of the brain sciences, with hundreds of papers on the role of consciousness in action initiation published each year. This makes the state-of-the-art in the discipline poorly accessible to newcomers, as well as difficult to follow for already engaged researchers. Here we aim to provide a comprehensive introduction to the field, with newcomers in mind. Furthermore, by means of systematic review, we identified interesting ideas that received little to no coverage in the literature, and which might hence prove useful even to experts in the field. We reviewed a set of more than 2100 papers following Benjamin Libet’s seminal experiment. With a detailed consideration for close to 500 of the most relevant papers, we extensively introduce the reader to Libet’s work (both his early studies on delays in conscious processing and his later, 1980’s experiments on volitional actions). We follow with common criticisms of temporal introspection, the interpretational challenges of the assumed physiological and anatomical correlates of volition, conceptual issues with the classical interpretation of Libet’s experiment. We conclude with recent advances and potential future directions of the field.