Effects of Incremental Mechanical Load on Readiness Potential Amplitude During Voluntary Movement

Voluntary movement arises from a sequence of neural processes that involve planning, preparation, and execution within distributed cortical networks. The readiness potential, a slow negative brain signal preceding self-initiated actions, represents a sensitive indicator of motor preparation. However, it remains unclear how this signal reflects concurrent variations in mechanical and temporal demands. In this study, twenty-eight healthy participants performed self-paced elbow flexions under nine combinations of mechanical load and movement duration while brain electrical activity, muscle activity, and movement kinematics were simultaneously recorded. Linear mixed-effects analyses revealed that the amplitude of the readiness potential increased progressively with greater mechanical load, indicating that cortical readiness scales with the intensity of preparatory effort. In contrast, longer movement durations produced smaller amplitudes, suggesting that extended temporal windows reduce the efficiency of preparatory synchronization. No significant interaction between load and duration was observed, supporting the idea of partially independent neural mechanisms for effort and timing. These findings identify the readiness potential as a neural marker integrating the energetic and temporal dimensions of voluntary movement and provide a basis for understanding how cortical readiness dynamically optimizes human motor performance.