As we age, our bodies change, for better or for worse. In response, our nervous system must adapt to its new physical relationship with the world. One way to handle the ever-changing interaction between our bodies and our environment is to create and update internal models that relate neural activity to movement (Shadmehr et al., 2010). In other words, these models represent how the body is expected to respond when a specific motor command is issued. By keeping track of this relationship, the nervous system can counter environmental change by altering motor commands on subsequent trials to produce the desired movement. This process is termed adaptation.

While brain structures, such as the cerebellum, have been implicated in the learning and storage of adapted motor responses (Wolpert and Miall, 1996), motor command structures, such as motor cortex, are thought to be responsible for implementation of the updated motor plan (Guo et al., 2015). Thus, conventional wisdom suggests that internal model information should be present in motor cortex during movement preparation and execution (Mandelblat-Cerf et al., 2011). In a recent paper, Stavisky et al.(2017) examined neural activity before a motor plan was selected (“baseline activity”) and asked whether representations of a recently adapted internal model existed in motor cortex.