Neural correlates of online action preparation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract When performing movements in rapid succession, the brain needs to coordinate preparation of an upcoming action with ongoing execution. Here we identify the processes and brain areas involved in this ability. Human participants performed pairs of single-finger presses or three-finger chords in settings where they had to prepare the second movement before or after the first response. Despite matched perceptual and movement requirements, 7T functional MRI revealed increased brain activity in regions along the intra-parietal sulcus and ventral visual stream when actions overlapped. Multivariate analyses suggested that these areas were involved in stimulus identification and action selection. In contrast, the dorsal premotor cortex, known to be involved in planning upcoming movements, showed no discernible signs of heightened activity. This observation suggests that the bottleneck during simultaneous action control and preparation arises at the level of stimulus identification and action selection, whereas movement planning in the premotor cortex can unfold concurrently with execution without interference between the two processes. Summary The brain’s ability to prepare for upcoming actions while controlling ongoing movements is a crucial evolutionary adaptation of the action system. However, the neural basis of online action preparation remains largely unknown. We found that superior-parietal and occipito-temporal areas exhibited heightened activation during online preparation. Surprisingly, the dorsal premotor cortex, known to be a crucial structure in motor planning, did not display additional activation for overlapping actions. These findings imply that while motor planning within the premotor cortex can occur in parallel with the execution of ongoing movement, the parallel stimulus identification and action selection in the posterior parietal cortex requires additional neural processes. Highlights Individuals prepare upcoming actions while simultaneously controlling ongoing movement When these two processes overlap, superior-parietal and occipito-temporal areas show increased activation Multivariate analysis suggests that increased activation arises to resolve simultaneous stimulus identification and action selection The premotor cortex, known to be involved in motor planning, coordinates simultaneous planning and execution without extra neural engagement
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".