bioRxiv · 10.64898/2025.12.11.691239
Pre-movement neural population activity in human motor cortex reflects the subsequent outcome of futsal free kicks
Abstract
Brain states immediately before movement may shape skilled athletic performance, but translating electroencephalography (EEG)-based monitoring to sport has been limited by dense montages and laboratory-constrained tasks. We asked whether a portable three-channel EEG system can detect outcome-related preparatory activity during a realistic futsal free-kick task. EEG from C3, Cz, and C4 during the 2 s before each kick was used to decode successful versus unsuccessful trials with channel-wise linear support vector machines (SVMs), and the same approach was tested for transfer across recording days. To relate decoding to interpretable physiology, alpha- and beta-band power were also compared between outcomes. Successful and failed kicks were decoded significantly above label-shuffled null distributions within recording days across all channels, showing that low-density EEG can capture sensor-level information linked to subsequent performance. However, decoding did not generalize reliably across days, indicating that these neural signatures were session specific. Spectral analysis showed selectively increased C3 beta-band power before successful kicks, whereas alpha-band power showed no significant outcome-related differences. These findings support portable EEG as a practical route toward monitoring preparatory brain states in sport, while suggesting that real-world use will require short day-specific calibration or adaptive decoding.
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Hirose, S., Ushiba, J., Iwama, S.. 2025-12-15. Pre-movement neural population activity in human motor cortex reflects the subsequent outcome of futsal free kicks. https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.11.691239
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