Human Movement Variability, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Pathology: Is There A Connection?

By N. Stergiou, Leslie Marion Decker. Human Movement Science, 2011

1,052 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fields studying movement generation, including robotics, psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience utilize concepts and tools related to the pervasiveness of variability in biological systems. The concept of variability and the measures for nonlinear dynamics used to evaluate this concept open new vistas for research in movement dysfunction of many types. This review describes innovations in the exploration of variability and their potential importance in understanding human movement. Far from being a source of error, evidence supports the presence of an optimal state of variability for healthy and functional movement. This variability has a particular organization and is characterized by a chaotic structure. Deviations from this state can lead to biological systems that are either overly rigid and robotic or noisy and unstable. Both situations result in systems that are less adaptable to perturbations, such as those associated with unhealthy pathological states or absence of skillfulness.

Subfields: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine, Cognitive Neuroscience, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ea1b7da45dfad19c4c41702339492e505397d7a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. D. Schmidtbleicher
2. P. Schubert
3. M. Kirchner
4. C. T. Haas

Citations in the corpus

• About the structure of posturography: Sampling duration, parametrization, focus of attention (part II) (2012, background): “Compared to traditional variables, these measures are believed to be more sensitive to diverse aspects of signal processing and are applied in order to understand physiological variability [32,33].”