Abstract
We explored the coupling of gaze and postural sway to the motion of a visual stimulus, to further understand sensorimotor coordination. Visual stimuli consisted of a horizontally oscillating red dot, moving with periodic (sine), chaotic, or aperiodic (brown noise) temporal structure. Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis (cRQA) was used to investigate the coupling between each measured signal with the time series of the visual stimulus position. The cRQA parameter of percent determinism indicated similar strength of coupling of gaze with either periodic or chaotic motion structures, yet weaker coupling to aperiodic stimulus motion. The cRQA parameter of Maxline indicated a particular affinity toward chaotic motion. Analysis of postural coupling supports the idea that the complex periodicity of body sway affords interactivity with non-simple environmental dynamics. These results collectively strengthen the argument that chaos is an invariant and beneficial feature of biological motion, a feature which may be critical for immediate and robust coordination of the self with the environment and other environmental agents.
Highlights
Humans exhibit oscillatory dynamics on many time scales, from sleep/wake cycles to breathing to regulation of posture
The one way ANOVA for percent determinism resulted in significant differences (p < 0.001)
The one way ANOVA for percent determinism resulted in significant differences for both COP (p < 0.001) and sensorimotor coupling (SensMot) (p = 0.004)
Summary
Humans exhibit oscillatory dynamics on many time scales, from sleep/wake cycles to breathing to regulation of posture. Even the routine of trips to the grocery must be repeated after some time has passed since the last visit. These are all processes which can be discretized, allowing their iterations to be viewed as single events. Each individual event truly occurs within series, with potentially critical interdependencies between iterations, making each event part of a more general continuity. To ensure success in this complex world, individuals must possess some means by which to coordinate the memories they have about previous events along with predictions about future events, all in line with the real-time ‘now’ which they are experiencing (Spivey, 2007). Our goal in this paper is to provide in the introduction a contextual motivation for an experiment that explores the role of the complexity of stimulus orderliness as a mediator of sensorimotor coordination, and through empirical analysis to provide further discussion
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