Does human balance behaviour reflect self-organized critical adaptive control?
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1
University of Bremen, Germany
When humans perform closed loop control tasks like in upright standing or while balancing a stick, their behaviour exhibits non-Gaussian fluctuations with long-tailed distributions. The origin of these fluctuations is not known. We investigated if they are caused by self-organized critical noise amplification which emerges in control systems when an unstable dynamics becomes stabilized by an adaptive controller that has finite memory. Starting from this theory, we developed a realistic model of adaptive closed loop control by including constraints on memory and delays. To test this model, we performed psychophysical experiments where humans balanced an unstable target on a screen. It turned out, that the model reproduces the long tails of the distributions together with other characteristic features of the human control dynamics. Fine-tuning the model to match the experimental dynamics identifies parameters characterizing a subject’s control system which can be independently tested. Our results suggest that the nervous system involved in closed loop motor control nearly optimally estimates system parameters on-line from very short epochs of past observations.
Conference:
Bernstein Symposium 2008, Munich, Germany, 8 Oct - 10 Oct, 2008.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
All Abstracts
Citation:
Pawelzik
KR
(2008). Does human balance behaviour reflect self-organized critical adaptive control?.
Front. Comput. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Bernstein Symposium 2008.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.10.2008.01.012
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Received:
11 Nov 2008;
Published Online:
11 Nov 2008.
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Correspondence:
Klaus R Pawelzik, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany, ajanssen@neuro.uni-bremen.de