BACKGROUND Backward walking is used increasingly in rehabilitation programs to promote balance, strength, and aerobic conditioning. This study examines the effect of movement direction on the temporal-spatial gait characteristics of old versus young adults when progressing at a comfortable pace and as fast as possible. METHODS Participants included 40 old (mean age 77.7, standard deviation +/...

BACKGROUND People recovering from a stroke are less stable during walking compared to able-bodied controls. The purpose of this study was to examine whether and how post-stroke individuals adapt their steady-state gait pattern to maintain or increase their margins of stability during walking, and to examine how these strategies differ from strategies employed by able-bodied people. METHODS Te...

Locomotion is a natural task that has been assessed for decades and used as a proxy to highlight impairments of various origins. So far, most studies adopted classical linear analyses of spatio-temporal gait parameters. Here, we use more advanced, yet not less practical, non-linear techniques to analyse gait time series of healthy subjects. We aimed at finding more sensitive indexes related to ...

Some aspects of backward locomotion are similar to forward locomotion, while other aspects are not related to their forward counterpart. The backward preferred transition speed (BPTS) has never been directly compared to the energetically optimal transition speed (EOTS), nor has it been compared to the preferred transition speed (PTS) during forward locomotion. The purpose of this study was to d...

A vast literature exists on human biological motion perception in impoverished displays, e.g., point-light walkers. Less is known about the perception of impoverished biological motion displays in macaques. We trained 3 macaques in the discrimination of facing direction (left versus right) and forward versus backward walking using motion-capture-based locomotion displays (treadmill walking) in ...

Using motor imagery, we investigated brain activation in simple and complex walking tasks (walking forward and backward on a treadmill) and analyzed if the motor status of older adults influenced these activation patterns. Fifty-one older adults (64-79 years of age) were trained in motor execution and imagery and then performed the imagination task and two control tasks (standing, counting back...

This essay develops performatively through somatic research related to conscious listening in verbal and embodied communication. The poiesis ensues from phenomenology, butoh, Zen, explaining butoh as a protest form of dance therapy with origins mid-20th Century Japan still continuing today. On walking back, the text slips inward—awakening matters environmental precarity ethic planetary care.

Temporal cortical neurons are known to respond to visual dynamic-action displays. Many human psychophysical and functional imaging studies examining biological motion perception have used treadmill walking, in contrast to previous macaque single-cell studies. We assessed the coding of locomotion in rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) temporal cortex using movies of stationary walkers, varying both f...