Motor planning under uncertainty

ABSTRACT Actions often require the selection of a specific goal amongst a range of possibilities, like when a softball player must precisely position her glove to field a fast-approaching ground ball. Previous studies have suggested that during goal uncertainty, the brain prepares for all potential goals in parallel and averages the corresponding motor plans to command an intermediate movement that is progressively refined as additional information becomes available. Although intermediate movements are widely observed, they could instead reflect a neural decision about the single best action choice at each point in time given the remaining uncertainty. Here we systematically dissociate these possibilities using novel experimental manipulations, and find that when confronted with uncertainty, humans generate a single motor plan that optimizes task performance, rather than averaging potential motor plans. In addition to accurate predictions of population-averaged changes in motor output, a novel computational model based on this performance-optimization theory accounted for a remarkable 80-90% of the variance for individual differences between participants. Our findings resolve a long-standing question about how the brain selects an action to execute during goal uncertainty, providing fundamental insight into motor planning in the nervous system.