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Movement Coordination

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Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

Definition of the Subject

Movement Coordination is present all the time in daily life but tends to be taken for granted when it works. One might say it is quite an arcanesubject also for science. This changes drastically when some pieces of the locomotor system are not functioning properly because of injury, disease orage. In most cases it is only then that people become aware of the complex mechanisms that must be in place to control and coordinate the hundreds ofmuscles and joints in the body of humans or animals to allow for maintaining balance while maneuvering through rough terrains, for example. No robotperformance comes even close in such a task.

Although these issues have been around for a long time it was only during the last quarter century that scientists developed quantitative models formovement coordination based on the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems . Coordination dynamics , as the field is now called, has become arguably...

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Abbreviations

Control parameter :

A parameter of internal or external origin that when manipulated controls the system in a nonspecific fashion and is capable of inducing changes in the system’s behavior. These changes may be a smooth function of the control parameter, or abrupt at certain critical values. The latter, also referred to as phase transitions, are of main interest here as they only occur in nonlinear systems and are accompanied by phenomena like critical slowing down and fluctuation enhancement that can be probed for experimentally.

Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) model :

First published in 1985, the HKB model is the best known and probably most extensively tested quantitative model in human movement behavior. In its original form it describes the dynamics of the relative phase between two oscillating fingers or limbs under frequency scaling. The HKB model can be derived from coupled nonlinear oscillators and has been successfully extended in various ways, for instance, to situations where different limbs like an arm and a leg, a single limb and a metronome, or even two different people are involved.

Order parameter :

Order parameters are quantities that allow for a usually low-dimensional description of the dynamical behavior of a high-dimensional system on a macroscopic level. These quantities change their values abruptly when a system undergoes a phase transition. For example, density is an order parameter in the ice to water, or water to vapor transitions. In movement coordination the most-studied order parameter is relative phase, i.?e. the difference in the phases between two or more oscillating entities.

Phase transition :

The best-known phase transitions are the changes from a solid to a fluid phase like ice to water, or from fluid to gas like water to vapor. These transitions are called first-order phase transitions as they involve latent heat, which means that a certain amount of energy has to be put into the system at the transition point that does not cause an increase in temperature. For the second-order phase transitions there is no latent heat involved. An example from physics is heating a magnet above its Curie temperature at which point it switches from a magnetic to a nonmagnetic state. The qualitative changes that are observed in many nonlinear dynamical systems when a parameter exceeds a certain threshold are also such second-order phase transitions.

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Acknowledgment

Work reported herein was supported by NINDS grant48299, NIMH grants 42900 and 80838, and the Pierre de Fermat Chair to J.A.S.K.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Complex Systems & Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA

    Armin Fuchs & James A. S. Kelso

  2. Department of Physics, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA

    Armin Fuchs

Authors
  1. Armin Fuchs
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  2. James A. S. Kelso
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. RAMTECH LIMITED, 122 Escalle Lane, Larkspur, CA, 94939, USA

    Robert A. Meyers Ph. D. (Editor-in-Chief) (Editor-in-Chief)

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag

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Fuchs, A., Kelso, J.A.S. (2009). Movement Coordination . In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_341

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