Motor coordination

In physiology, motor coordination is the orchestrated movement of multiple body parts as required to accomplish intended actions, like walking.

This coordination is achieved by adjusting kinematic and kinetic parameters associated with each body part involved in the intended movement.

[3] Actions and movements can be executed in multiple ways because synergies (as described below) can vary without changing the outcome.

There is simultaneous coordination between hand and eye movement as dictated by the multi-sensory integration of proprioceptive and visual information.

[4] Additional levels of coordination are required depending on if the person intends to drink from the glass, give it to someone else, or simply put it on a table.

In walking for instance, inter-limb coordination refers to the spatiotemporal patterns and kinematics associated with the movement of the legs.

Prior work in vertebrates showed that distinct inter-limb coordination patterns, called gaits, occur at different walking speed ranges as to minimize the cost of transport.

[8] Several studies have proposed that inter-limb coordination can be modeled by coupled phase oscillators,[9][10] a key component of a central pattern generator (CPG) control architecture.

In addition to driving the relative limb movement in a forward manner, sensory feedback can be incorporated into the CPG architecture.

An example of such concept is the minimum-jerk model proposed by Neville Hogan and Tamar Flash,[12] which suggests that the parameter the nervous system controls is the spatial path of the hand, ensuring that it is maximally smooth.

[17] The following pages are recommended for understanding how coordination patterns are learned or adapted: Nikolai Bernstein proposed the existence of muscle synergies as a neural strategy of simplifying the control of multiple degrees of freedom.

Work from Emilio Bizzi suggests that sensory feedback adapts synergies to fit behavioral constraints, but may differ in an experience-dependent manner.

[26] This hypothesis proposes that the controller (the brain) acts in the space of elemental variables (i.e. the rotations shared by the shoulder, elbow, and wrist in arm movements) and selects the feasible manifolds (i.e. sets of angular values corresponding to a final position).

An interesting example of the good variability was observed in the movements of the tongue, which are responsible for the speech production.