Figure 1. Experimental design, visuomotor task and movement parameters.

Top left: participants were required to execute a visuomotor task, consisting of performing a single continuous clockwise movement of a cursor displayed on a screen, by sliding the right index finger over a touchpad. Top right: before the subjects performed the movement, task‐irrelevant auditory or somatosensory stimuli were delivered using different paradigms (Experiments 1–4). In Experiment 5, no stimuli were delivered. The EEG was recorded in all experiments. Bottom: schematic representation of the visuomotor task. For each trial, parameters describing the cursor movement in its spatial and temporal aspects were calculated as follows: MOT was the time elapsed between the onset of the ‘go’ signal and the first time point (t _r) at which the cursor was outside the circle of radius r centred around the starting position; TMT was the time elapsed between movement onset (t _r) and the time point at which the cursor re‐entered the circle around the starting position (t _s). Path was the length of the cursor's trajectory; Overall Accuracy was the mean accuracy across the five targets (accuracy at each target n was calculated as the Euclidean distance between the position of the cursor at target n and the actual position of target n, irrespective of side); Overall Speed was the Path divided by the TMT. Arrows indicate the direction of the movement. [Color figure can be viewed at http://wileyonlinelibrary.com]