Cortical field potential associated with hand movement on warning-imperative visual stimulus and cerebellum in the monkey.

Latent time of the hand movement in response to a visual stimulus was found to be very short when a monkey was enough trained with a visual imperative stimulus preceded by a visual warning stimulus at a fixed time interval. Cerebellar hemispherectomy scarcely prolonged the reaction time of the warning-imperative, visually initiated (W-VI) movement in contrast to its marked delaying action upon the simple visually initiated reaction-time (S-VI) movement. Between the warning and imperative stimuli, sustained surface-negative, depth-positive field potentials were recorded in various areas of the prefrontal and premotor cortices and the supplementary motor area of both cerebral hemispheres, besides gradually increasing surface-negative, depth-positive deflections in the motor and somatosensory cortices contralateral to the moving hand. These observations suggest that the sustained activities in the prefrontal and premotor cortices elicited by the warning stimulus overcome deficiency of the cerebellar function for performing fast and stable timing movements.