Neural Representations of Intended Movement

Intention is a mental state that reflects a desire to produce action. In sensorimotor neurophysiology, intention is largely synonymous with movement planning. Studies of animals engaged in movement planning, as well experiments involving human patients piloting brain-computer interfaces, have greatly increased our understanding of intention-related brain activity. In some brain areas this activity appears to clearly represent features of impending movements, e.g. movement goals and/or the motion parameters that will achieve those goals. In other areas, activity appears consistent with a dynamical process that ultimately produces movement-related activity but may or may not represent movement parameters per se.