Hippocampus/medial temporal lobe, prefrontal cortex, DLPFC, caudate/striatum, premotor cortex, SMA/pre-SMA
In plain language
A familiar option can be recognized without a person knowing whether they previously chose it, rejected it, or merely encountered it. Separately, a present action can sit inside a long history of doing the same thing repeatedly even when there is no uncertainty about what happened before.
The paper treats those as different historical relations. One proposed test changes how clearly a person can distinguish their own prior action from mere familiarity. The other changes the accumulated history of repeatedly performing the same current action and asks whether that history changes self-timed initiation.
Abstract
Past behavior influences future behavior through established routes including source memory, episodic retrieval, habit, value learning, and recent action history. The broad proposition that history matters is not the contribution. This theoretical article asks whether distinct informational relations to a person’s own prior actions can be manipulated separately while the immediate action problem is held sufficiently fixed, and whether those relations make independently testable contributions to present action. Test A manipulates encoding-stage source diagnosticity for equally familiar self-chosen and seen-but-not-chosen options, independently validates source discrimination and generic recognition, and asks whether later option weighting changes. Test B manipulates context-specific accumulated history of performing the same present action, crosses that history with anticipated future recurrence, and measures bounded self-timed onset alongside a temporally yoked externally triggered comparison. Established source-monitoring, self-action-memory, habit, context-response, and action-history findings are treated as precedents rather than discoveries. The two tests are not assumed to share a lower-level mechanism. Their proposed unity is an experimental identification discipline: distinguish the present action problem from the historical relation, validate the manipulation independently, preserve alternative latent routes, and retain branch-specific failure conditions. The article proposes future experiments and reports no new participant data. Test A, Test B, and their higher-level composition remain open, and exact paper-level originality is not asserted as established.
Why it matters
Past behavior is often used as though it were one explanatory variable, but source memory, episodic retrieval, habit, repetition, and recent action history can reach present behavior through different routes. A current choice or delay therefore does not identify which historical relation mattered.
The proposed design makes the historical relation itself the experimental target while trying to keep the immediate action problem stable. That allows the effects of self-action provenance and repeated-action history to be tested without assuming that they share one mechanism or that any particular direction of effect must occur.
If the distinctions survive the controls, they would provide a cleaner way to ask how a person’s own action history contributes to present choice and initiation without reducing every history effect to familiarity, habit, or a single latent cause.