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Perceptual coupling in rhythmic movement coordination: stable perception leads to stable action

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Abstract

Rhythmic movement coordination exhibits characteristic patterns of stability, specifically that movements at 0° mean relative phase are maximally stable, 180° is stable but less so than 0°, and other coordinations are unstable without training. Recent research has demonstrated a role for perception in creating this pattern; perceptual variability judgments covary with movement variability results. This suggests that the movement results could be due in part to differential perceptual resolution of the target movement coordinations. The current study used a paradigm that enabled simultaneous access to both perception (between-trial) and movement (within-trial) stability measures. A visually specified 0° target mean relative phase enabled participants to produce stable movements when the movements were at a non-0° relationship to the target being tracked. Strong relationships were found between within-trial stability (the traditional movement measure) and between-trial stability (the traditional perceptual judgment measure), suggestive of a role for perception in producing coordination stability phenomena. The stabilization was incomplete, however, indicating that visual perception was not the sole determinant of movement stability. Rhythmic movement coordination is intrinsically a perception/action system.

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Notes

  1. Having to rely on circular statistics such as MVL means that the discussion of results will be reversed from what is usual in the movement coordination literature. Instead of “variability” (which increases with standard deviation) we will instead use “stability”, which increases with MVL. This should be kept in mind when comparing this data with previous results. Transforming the data by ln(1/MVL) rescales MVL to more closely resemble a standard deviation, however, we wished to minimize the number of data transformations we performed

  2. This effect can clearly be seen in Fig. 2—the predicted U-shaped function is pronounced in the between-trial data but absent in the within-trial data. In the 90:90 condition, participants spent time at more stable relative phases, elevating the within-trial stability to be similar to that at 180:180, and lowering the between-trial stability

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Acknowledgements

We thank Joshua Isaacson for his help in collecting the data. The Indiana University super-computing cluster is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0116050. Portions of this data were presented at the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, Sarasota, FL, May 9–14 2003.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Indiana University, 1101 E10th St, Bloomington, IN, 47405-7007, USA

    Andrew D. Wilson & Geoffrey P. Bingham

  2. Department of Neurological Surgery, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA

    David R. Collins

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  1. Andrew D. Wilson
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  2. David R. Collins
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  3. Geoffrey P. Bingham
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Correspondence to Geoffrey P. Bingham.

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Wilson, A.D., Collins, D.R. & Bingham, G.P. Perceptual coupling in rhythmic movement coordination: stable perception leads to stable action. Exp Brain Res 164, 517–528 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-2272-3

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