The neurophysiology of continuous action monitoring

Monitoring actions is essential for goal-directed behavior. However, as opposed to short-lasting, and regularly reinstating monitoring functions, the neural pro-cesses underlying continuous action monitoring are poorly understood. We inves-tigate this using a pursuit-tracking paradigm. We show that beta band activity likely maintains the sensorimotor program, while theta and alpha bands probably support attentional sampling and information gating, respectively. Alpha and beta band activity are most relevant during the initial tracking period, when sensorimotor calibrations are most intense. Theta band shifts from parietal to frontal cortices throughout tracking, likely reflecting a shift in the functional rele-vance from attentional sampling to action monitoring. This study shows that resource allocation mechanisms in prefrontal areas and stimulus-response map-ping processes in the parietal cortex are crucial for adapting sensorimotor pro-cesses. It fills a knowledge gap in understanding the neural processes underlying action monitoring and suggests new directions for examining sensorimotor inte-gration in more naturalistic experiments.