Synergies: Stabilities, instabilities, and modes. Commentary/Nashner & McCollum: Human postural movement.
| Number | 503 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1985 |
| Drawer | 9 |
| Entry Date | 11/19/1999 |
| Authors | Saltzman, E. & Kelso, J. A. S. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 161-163. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0503.pdf |
| Abstract | [Introduction] Nashner and McCollum (N&M) have addressed the question of whether muscle synergies exist for complex skilled activity, and if so, how they are organized (see also Kelso & Tuller 1983/1984; Lee 1984). The authors argue that muscle synergies exist for postural stability tasks in the form of a small set of discretely represented control entities, and that postural corrective movements of the dynamically continuous musculoskeletal system are organized through the operation of these discrete synergy elements. In this commentary, we make two main points: first, that N & M’s arguments are not supported sufficiently by their data (i.e. the data do not allow one to distinguish between their discrete synergy model and other model types); we will describe the sort of data that would be convincing. And second, because N & M stress the “universality and importance of global schemes “ for sensorimotor coordination and “principles governing the interactions among elements” that lead to “testable hypotheses,” we mention briefly a theoretical framework that is attractive to us (e.g., Kelso 1984; Kelso and Saltzman 1982; Kelso and Tuller 1983/1984; Kugler, Kelso & Turvey 1980; 1982) because it treats cooperative phenomena in multicomponent systems on the basis of first principles (e.g. Haken 1975). We feel that this framework can:(1) offer a firmer basis for some of N & M’s existing experimental strategy that would illuminate N & M’s hypothesis of region-specific discrete synergies. |
| Notes |
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