The article is titled “The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements”. There are seven authors and contributors to this article. Matthias Schultze-Kraft (Bernstein Center for and Daniel Birman were the primary contributors to this work. John-Dylan Haynes conceived the study, Matthias Schultze-Kraft, Daniel Birman, Marco Rusconi, Benjamin Blankertz, and John-Dylan Haynes designed the experiment; Matthias Schultze-Kraft and Daniel Birman performed research; Matthias Schultze-Kraft, Daniel Birman, Marco Rusconi, Carsten Allefeld, Kai Görgen, Sven Dähne, Benjamin Blankertz, and John-Dylan Haynes contributed new analytic tools; Matthias Schultze-Kraft and Benjamin Blankertz adapted the BBCI toolbox for this experiment; Matthias Schultze-Kraft …show more content…
The readiness potential is the measure of activity in the motor-related brain regions that preceded voluntary muscle movement. The test was whether subjects can win against a brain-computer interface which is designed to predict their movements based off their EEG (Electroencephalography) activity. One possibility was that the RP triggers a chain that can’t be cancelled, but in the end, the study found the RP could be stopped as long it was not pass the point of no return. The experiment consists of three stages. In stage one, stop signals were sent at random times (There was a floor-mounted button and a light on a computer screen. Once, the light turns green, subjects waited for about 2 seconds after which they could press the button at any time. The stop signal refers to a green light turning red and the button should be pressed while the light is green and not after the light turns red. If the brain-computer interface predicts the movement, then the light would turn red.). In stage two, the stop signals were sent by the brain-computer interface. In stage three, the subjects were informed about the predictor and told to move unpredictably. There were 12 right-handed subjects that were aged in their 20s included in the study. The readiness potential and trial outcomes had the same distribution for stages two and three, indicating subjects could not act more unpredictably. The study demonstrates that subjects can stop a movement even after the brain was preparing the movement (Readiness potential). However, cancellation of movement was only possible if the subject stopped the signal at least 200 milliseconds earlier before the movement. This is the point of no return and it is not possible to stop the movement after this time period. Even after the point of no return (200 milliseconds before movement onset), it is