Motor Coordination and Expertise

Ontologically, our research is conducted from the perspective of human motor behavior as a complex system at the interface of biomechanics and motor control, with dynamical systems theory providing a means for understanding the complexity of human motor behavior beyond the purely mechanical analysis of movement. As our focus is on functional rather than structural aspects, we investigate the time dynamics of behavior, the changes in system states, and the constraints that affect state changes rather than comparisons of states before and after training, before and after learning. This perspective has given us another vision of the nature of expertise, performance optimization, and motor control and learning, especially through our studies on how the interactions of constraints affect a system (constraints-led approach, Davids et al., 2008) by testing its stability (adaptation to disturbance) and analyzing its variability (flexibility between stable states).