Joint improvisation is often observed among humans performing joint action tasks. Exploring the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms behind the emergence of joint improvisation is an open research challenge. This paper investigates jointly improvised movements between two participants in the mirror game, a paradigmatic joint task example. First, experiments involving movement coordination...

Humans and other species explore a visual scene by rapidly shifting their gaze 2-3 times every second. Although the eyes may appear immobile in the brief intervals in between saccades, microscopic (fixational) eye movements are always present, even when attending to a single point. These movements occur during the very periods in which visual information is acquired and processed and their func...

This study sought to determine whether significant changes would be observed between vergence eye movements before and after 12 hr of repetitive vergence therapy (1 hr per day on different days) in subjects with normal binocular vision compared to controls. Disparity vergence responses from 23 subjects were studied. An assessment protocol that minimized the influence of the near dissociated pho...

The generation of movements in closed kinematic chains as opposed to open kinematic chains is a challenging task because all participating joints have to be moved in a highly coordinated manner in order to avoid destructive tensions in the limb. In this paper we present a new decentral joint controller which uses low level interactions between a moving joint and its environment consisting of ne...

BACKGROUND A sit-to-stand (STS) movement requires muscle strength higher than that of other daily activities. There are many elderly people, who experience difficulty when standing up from a chair. The muscle strength required (or the load on the joints) during a STS task is determined by the kinematics (movement pattern). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the kinematics and resultant j...

We present a methodology for real-time estimation of joint kinematics, joint moments, and muscle forces. This allows the design of rehabilitation exercises in which biomechanical variables drive a virtual environment. As an example we demonstrate real-time visualization of muscle forces on a 3D realtime visualization of patient movements.

This paper aims at challenging Bernstein’s problem called the “Degrees-of-Freedom problem”, which is known to remain unsolved from both the physiological and robotics viewpoints. More than a half century ago A.N. Bernstein observed and claimed that “dexterity” resident in human limb motion emerges from accumulated involvement of multi-joint movements in surplus DOF. It is also said in robotics ...