Premovement slow cortical potentials and required muscle force in self-paced hand movements in the monkey

Surface negative--deep positive, slowly increasing potentials prior to self-paced hand movements were recorded in the contralateral premotor, motor and somatosensory cortices, with chronically implanted electrodes. Such premovement slow potentials in the 3 cortical areas changed their magnitudes with the required muscle force in the hand movement, and the potentials in the different cortices appeared to differ slightly in the manner of change. These results may suggest that the EPSPs in the superficial parts of apical dendrites of cortical pyramidal neurons principally via certain thalamo-cortical projections are induced prior to movements in the cortices so as to adjust the required force on anticipation, and that the premotor, motor and somatosensory cortices play some different functional roles in preparatory processes for the movement performance.