Learned associations constrain anticipatory visual dynamics and enhance sensory and motor readiness to facilitate perceptual decisions

Predictive visual cues preactivate target-specific representations in human visual cortex before target onset and elicit response-specific motor beta suppression, improving perceptual decision speed.

• Why it matters: It remains unclear whether learned cue–target links mainly drive anticipatory preparation, post-target sensory enhancement, or both, and how they reshape neural dynamics.
• What they did: Using magnetoencephalography during living/nonliving judgments with learned predictive versus uninformative cues, representational similarity analysis quantified pretarget visual activity and motor beta suppression.
• The result: Prediction showed little evidence of enhanced posttarget visual specificity, while both visual specificity and anticipatory motor preparation independently predicted response speed, with drift diffusion modeling linking specificity to faster evidence accumulation and motor preparation to shorter nondecision time.

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