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Switching between cognitive states is a natural tendency, even for trained experts. To test how cognitive state impacts the relationship between neural activity and behavior, we measured cortex-wide neural activity during decision-making in mice. Task variables and instructed movements elicited similar neural responses regardless of state, but the neural activity associated with spontaneous, uninstructed movements became highly variable during disengagement. Surprisingly, this heightened variability was not due to an increase in movements: behavioral videos showed equally frequent movements in both cognitive states. But while the movement frequency remained similar, movement timing changed: as animals slipped into disengagement, their movements became erratically timed. These idiosyncratic movements were a strong predictor of task performance and drove increased variance in neural activity. Our results argue that movements constitute an embodied signature of cognitive state. These observations lay the foundation for future large-scale recording experiments in freely moving animals that we will conduct using novel tools that we have recently developed.