ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 155 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
155 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 509 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Rhythmic oscillations of visual contrast sensitivity synchronized with action.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2015Trial
- Modulating conscious movement intention by noninvasive brain stimulation and the underlying neural mechanisms.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2015Trial
- Better get back to work: a role for motor beta desynchronization in incentive motivation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2014Trial
- No evidence for modulation of the readiness potential by respiratory phase during natural breathing.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Factors that influence the amplitude of the bereitschaftspotential.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2026Review
- Action fluency and conscious intention: being aware of what we are about to do.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Decoding time from space: A review of the complication clock and its representation of temporal experience.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Sensory processing sensitivity is associated with state-dependent stabilization of perceptual organization in auditory streaming.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- A brain-wide, trial- and time-dependent deterministic drive synergizes with within-trial noise to time self-initiated actions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Spatial Distance and Temporal Attentional Focus Modulate Voluntary Action Preparation and Awareness.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Dynamics of the stream of thought: insights from an accumulation-to-threshold model.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Pre-movement EEG microstates reflect intended lifted load of volitional movement.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Biomimetic model of corticostriatal micro-assemblies discovers a neural code.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Motor beta oscillations contribute to the temporal binding effect.Brain and cognition · 2025Article
- A Neural Signature of the Bias Toward Self-Focus.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- The Compass of Commitment: Control Mechanisms Underpinning the Sense of Individual and Joint Commitment.Cognitive science · 2025Review
95 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A gradual buildup of neuronal activity known as the "readiness potential" reliably precedes voluntary self-initiated movements, in the average time locked to movement onset. This buildup is presumed to reflect the final stages of planning and preparation for movement. Here we present a different interpretation of the premovement buildup. We used a leaky stochastic accumulator to model the neural decision of "when" to move in a task where there is no specific temporal cue, but only a general imperative to produce a movement after an unspecified delay on the order of several seconds. According to our model, when the imperative to produce a movement is weak, the precise moment at which the decision threshold is crossed leading to movement is largely determined by spontaneous subthreshold fluctuations in neuronal activity. Time locking to movement onset ensures that these fluctuations appear in the average as a gradual exponential-looking increase in neuronal activity. Our model accounts for the behavioral and electroencephalography data recorded from human subjects performing the task and also makes a specific prediction that we confirmed in a second electroencephalography experiment: Fast responses to temporally unpredictable interruptions should be preceded by a slow negative-going voltage deflection beginning well before the interruption itself, even when the subject was not preparing to move at that particular moment.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.