Luring the Motor System: Impact of Performance-Contingent Incentives on Pre-Movement Beta-Band Activity and Motor Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been shown that when incentives are provided during movement preparation, activity in parieto-frontal regions reflects both expected value and motivational salience. Yet behavioral work suggests that the processing of rewards is faster than for punishments, raising the possibility that expected value and motivational salience manifest at different latencies during movement planning. Given the role of beta oscillations (13–30 Hz) in movement preparation and in communication within the reward circuit, this study investigated how beta activity is modulated by positive and negative monetary incentives during reach planning, and in particular whether it reflects expected value and motivational salience at different latencies. Electroencephalography was recorded while male and female humans performed a reaching task in which reward or punishment delivery depended on movement accuracy. Before a preparatory delay period, participants were informed of the consequences of hitting or missing the target, according to four experimental conditions: Neutral (hit/miss:+0/−0¢), Reward (hit/miss:+5/−0¢), Punish (hit/miss:+0/−5¢) and Mixed (hit/miss:+5/−5¢). Results revealed that beta power over parieto-frontal regions was strongly modulated by incentives during the delay period, with power positively correlating with movement times. Interestingly, beta power was selectively sensitive to potential rewards early in the delay period, after which it came to reflect motivational salience as movement onset neared. These results demonstrate that beta activity reflects expected value and motivational salience on different time scales during reach planning. They also provide support for models that link beta activity with basal ganglia and dopamine for the allocation of neural resources according to behavioral salience. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The present work demonstrates that pre-movement parieto-frontal beta power is modulated by monetary incentives in a goal-directed reaching task. Specifically, beta power transiently scaled with the availability of rewards early in movement planning, before reflecting motivational salience as movement onset neared. Moreover, pre-movement beta activity correlated with the vigor of the upcoming movement. These findings suggest that beta oscillations reflect neural processes that mediate the invigorating effect of incentives on motor performance, possibly through dopamine-mediated interactions with the basal ganglia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".