Our results underscore the central role of action in human cognition, with motor-centric error encoding likely conferring advantages for adaptive and flexible behaviour.

Thanks to Rossetti, Schwarz, @siegellab.bsky.social , Braun and @agreco.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Finally, cross-decoding analysis showed significant pattern generalization only when the motor output was identical but not when the sensory input was held constant, suggesting that temporal prediction errors were primarily encoded in a motor rather than sensory space.

Crucially, we found action-oriented prediction error encoding even when controlling for motor confounds by removing motor-evoked activity from the original data, indicating that the effect was not just a motor artifact.

By fitting prediction error trajectories to the brain data, we found that error signals were amplified when a response was required following the tactile stimulation, compared to when the stimulus was passively received.

Multivariate decoding analyses highlighted a distributed frontocentral 🧠 network linked to tactile-motor associations which predicted reaction-time variability across trials.

We recorded MEG while participants received temporally jittered finger stimulations, either just perceiving them (stimulus only) or reacting as fast as possible (stimulus response), allowing us to dissect how action demands shape the brain’s encoding of temporal expectations.