Selection, preparation, and monitoring: current approaches to studying the neural control of action.

Imagine an athlete throwing a disc, as shown on the cover of this issue. We see him tensing his muscles but how can we know which brain structures control this powerful action? The ancient Greeks could only observe and measure limited, external aspects of this movement, such as the timing of muscle flexions and the distance the discus is thrown. Just as the ancient Greeks, until recently we had little way to observe the brain mechanisms that give rise to this feat. Since movements were considered to be difficult to transfer to the laboratory to provide quantitative data, the study of movement has for a long time been one of the less studied fields of cognitive psychology. The rise of various techniques to study the human brain during task performance initially seemed to aggravate these problems, as they all require the participant to remain motionless for an extended period and are highly sensitive to movement artifacts. As such, the study of movement has long been a neglected child in the realm of cognitive neuroscience. Over the last 15 years, however, this situation has changed. This is due in part to the rise of various imaging techniques and accompanying statistical tools that are less sensitive to these problems, but also to the increasing interest in the cognitive processes associated with any movement. Indeed, rather than focusing on the movement directly, this research is focusing on the processes leading up to the movement and the evaluation of the consequences of the movement following its execution. All these processes that precede and directly follow observable movements are nowadays collectively referred to as actions. These developments, in turn, have led to a large rise in popularity of action-related research. The goal of this special issue of Cortex is to illustrate