Background: The maintenance of balance and body orientation in humans is guaranteed by the adequate functioning of the postural

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Freitas, Sandra M.S.F., Marcos Duarte, and Mark L. Latash. Two kinematic synergies in voluntary whole-body movements during standing. J Neurophysiol 95: 636 -645, 2006. First published November 2, 2005 doi:10.1152/jn.00482.2005. We used a particular computational approach, the uncontrolled manifold hypothesis, to investigate joint angle covariation patterns during whole-body actions performed by standing persons. We hypothesized that two kinematic synergies accounted for the leg/trunk joint covariation across cycles during a rhythmic whole-body motion to stabilize two performance variables, the trunk orientation in the external space and the horizontal position of the center of mass (COM). Subjects stood on a force plate and performed whole-body rhythmic movements for 45 s under visual feedback on one of the four variables, the position of the center of pressure or the angle in one of the three joints (ankle, knee, or hip). The Fitts-like paradigm was used with two target amplitudes and six indices of difficulty (ID) for each of the four variables. This was done to explore the robustness of kinematic postural synergies. A speedaccuracy trade-off was observed in all feedback conditions such that the movement time scaled with ID and the scaling differed between the two movement amplitudes. Principal-component (PC) analysis showed the existence of a single PC in the joint space that accounted for over 95% of the joint angle variance. Analysis within the uncontrolled manifold hypothesis has shown that data distributions in the joint angle space were compatible with stabilization of both trunk orientation and COM location. We conclude that trunk orientation and the COM location are stabilized by co-varied changes of the major joint angles during whole-body movements. Despite the strong effects of movement amplitude and ID on performance, the structure of the joint variance showed only minor dependence on these task parameters. The two kinematic synergies (co-varied changes in the joint angles that stabilized the COM location and trunk orientation) have proven to be robust over a variety of tasks.

This study examined the hypothesis that the degree to which motor redundancy is used to coordinate joint motions for reaching is influenced by motor planning and enhanced when the task requires greater movement flexibility. Subjects reached at arm's length to the same centrally placed target under conditions where the target location was either certain or uncertain, using a double-step paradigm. The hypothesis was evaluated by partitioning the across-trials variance of the joint configuration at each percent of the reach into a component corresponding to the use of different joint angle combinations to achieve an equivalent hand position (GEV) and a component leading to a variable hand position (NGEV). Pointer-tip movement variability along the path and variable targeting error did not differ between conditions. Larger overall joint variance was found for the uncertain target condition. Most of this increase was GEV, which was significantly higher in the uncertain condition for control of both movement extent and movement direction. In contrast, NGEV differed between the two conditions only for the control of movement extent early in the reach, suggesting that target uncertainty led to inter-trial timing variability along the movement path. The results suggest that more flexible patterns of joint coordination are used when the nervous system must plan reaching movements to an uncertain target direction.

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