BCIwiki (bciwiki.com) — The study was published in the journal Current biology : CB on August 11, 2026. Over the course of a voluntary movement, motor cortical activity exhibits a transition from preparation to execution, with markedly different activity across these phases. Preparatory activity could improve brain-computer interfaces by anticipating a user's intended movement trajectory. However, understanding which features of upcoming movements are encoded by preparatory activity in humans is essential for clinical BCI applications.
Researchers Rigotti-Thompson M., Nason-Tomaszewski S.R., Bechefsky P.H., Acosta A., Hahn N.V., and Avansino D.T. collected intracortical recordings from three research participants in the BrainGate2 clinical trial to investigate whether diverse movement features are encoded by preparatory activity. They found that preparatory activity is tuned to the direction of upcoming movements, and this tuning is largely preserved across different effectors. Further investigation showed that preparatory activity is also informative of initial and target directions of curved trajectories and encodes, to a weaker extent, movement distance or speed.
The team presented an online control paradigm that leverages preparatory activity to predict movements toward intended directions in advance, yielding rapid, user-initiated control of a computer cursor by human participants. These results demonstrate that preparatory activity in the human motor cortex encodes rich features of upcoming movement, highlighting its potential for high-performance BCI applications.