Motor Conflict: Revealing Involuntary Conditioned Motor Preparation Using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Preparing actions to achieve goals, overriding habitual responses, and substituting actions that are no longer relevant are aspects of motor control often assumed to be driven by deliberate top-down processes. In the present study, we investigated whether motor control could come under involuntary control of environmental cues that have been associated with specific actions in the past. We used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to probe corticospinal excitability as an index of motor preparation, while participants performed a Go/No-Go task (i.e., an action outcome or no action outcome task) and rated what trial was expected to appear next (Go or No-Go). We found that corticospinal excitability during a warning cue for the upcoming trial closely matched recent experience (i.e., cue-outcome pairings), despite conflicting with what participants expected would appear. The results reveal that in an action-outcome task, neurophysiological indices of motor preparation show changes that are consistent with participants learning to associate a preparatory warning cue with a specific action, and are not consistent with the action that participants explicitly anticipate making. This dissociation with conscious expectancy ratings reveals that conditioned responding and motor preparation can operate independently of conscious expectancies about having to act.