Motor Synergies and the Equilibrium-Point Hypothesis

By Mark L. Latash. Motor Control, 2010

321 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The article offers a way to unite three recent developments in the field of motor control and coordination: (1) The notion of synergies is introduced based on the principle of motor abundance; (2) The uncontrolled manifold hypothesis is described as offering a computational framework to identify and quantify synergies; and (3) The equilibrium-point hypothesis is described for a single muscle, single joint, and multi-joint systems. Merging these concepts into a single coherent scheme requires focusing on control variables rather than performance variables. The principle of minimal final action is formulated as the guiding principle within the referent configuration hypothesis. Motor actions are associated with setting two types of variables by a controller, those that ultimately define average performance patterns and those that define associated synergies. Predictions of the suggested scheme are reviewed, such as the phenomenon of anticipatory synergy adjustments, quick actions without changes in synergies, atypical synergies, and changes in synergies with practice. A few models are briefly reviewed.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dac5949b2a68a650d06141c61bc71bc8df3b2b0a

Citations in the corpus

• The Bliss of Motor Abundance (2012, unknown): “After a RC is established, a sequence of few-to-many mappings leads to inputs into -motoneuronal pools that deWne thresholds of the tonic stretch reXex for the involved muscles (Latash 2010).”