No abstract

The current assessment of behaviors in the inventories to diagnose autism spectrum disorders (ASD) focus on observation and discrete categorizations. Behaviors require movements, yet measurements of physical movements are seldom included. Their inclusion however, could provide an objective characterization of behavior to help unveil interactions between the peripheral and the central nervous systems (CNSs). Such interactions are critical for the development and maintenance of spontaneous autonomy, self-regulation, and voluntary control. At present, current approaches cannot deal with the heterogeneous, dynamic and stochastic nature of development. Accordingly, they leave no avenues for real time or longitudinal assessments of change in a coping system continuously adapting and developing compensatory mechanisms. We offer a new unifying statistical framework to reveal re-afferent kinesthetic features of the individual with ASD. The new methodology is based on the non-stationary stochastic patterns of minute fluctuations (micro-movements) inherent to our natural actions. Such patterns of behavioral variability provide re-entrant sensory feedback contributing to the autonomous regulation and coordination of the motor output. From an early age, this feedback supports centrally driven volitional control and fluid, flexible transitions between intentional and spontaneous behaviors. We show that in ASD there is a disruption in the maturation of this form of proprioception. Despite this disturbance, each individual has unique adaptive compensatory capabilities that we can unveil and exploit to evoke faster and more accurate decisions. Measuring the kinesthetic re-afference in tandem with stimuli variations we can detect changes in their micro-movements indicative of a more predictive and reliable kinesthetic percept. Our methods address the heterogeneity of ASD with a personalized approach grounded in the inherent sensory-motor abilities that the individual has already developed.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have significant visuomotor processing deficits, atypical motoric behavior, and often substantial problems connecting socially. We suggest that the perceptual, attentional, and adaptive timing deficiencies associated with autism might directly impact the ability to become a socially connected unit with others. Using a rocking chair paradigm previously employed with typical adults, we demonstrate that typically-developing (TD) children exhibit spontaneous social rocking with their caregivers. In contrast, children diagnosed with ASD do not demonstrate a tendency to rock in a symmetrical state with their parents. We argue that the movement of our bodies is one of the fundamental ways by which we connect with our environment and, especially, ground ourselves in social environments. Deficiencies in perceiving and responding to the rhythms of the world may have serious consequences for the ability to become adequately embedded in a social context.

Explaining how the cognitive system can create new structures has been a major challenge for cognitive science. Self-organization from the theory of nonlinear dynamics offers an account of this remarkable phenomenon. Two studies provide an initial test of the hypothesis that the emergence of new cognitive structure follows the same universal principles as emergence in other domains (e.g., fluids, lasers). In both studies, participants initially solved gear-system problems by manually tracing the force across a system of gears. Subsequently, they discovered that the gears form an alternating sequence, thereby demonstrating a new cognitive structure. In both studies, dynamical analyses of action during problem solving predicted the spontaneous emergence of the new cognitive structure. Study 1 showed that a peak in entropy, followed by negentropy, key indicators of self-organization, predicted discovery of alternation. Study 2 replicated these effects, and showed that increasing environmental entropy accelerated discovery, a classic prediction from dynamics. Additional analyses based on the relationship between phase transitions and power-law behavior provide converging evidence. The studies provide an initial demonstration of the emergence of cognitive structure through self-organization.

There is a critical need for new analytics to personalize behavioral data analysis across different fields, including kinesiology, sports science, and behavioral neuroscience. Specifically, to better translate and integrate basic research into patient care, we need to radically transform the methods by which we describe and interpret movement data. Here, we show that hidden in the “noise,” smoothed out by averaging movement kinematics data, lies a wealth of information that selectively differentiates neurological and mental disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, deafferentation, autism spectrum disorders, and schizophrenia from typically developing and typically aging controls. In this report, we quantify the continuous forward-and-back pointing movements of participants from a large heterogeneous cohort comprising typical and pathological cases. We empirically estimate the statistical parameters of the probability distributions for each individual in the cohort and report the parameter ranges for each clinical group after characterization of healthy developing and aging groups. We coin this newly proposed platform for individualized behavioral analyses “precision phenotyping” to distinguish it from the type of observational–behavioral phenotyping prevalent in clinical studies or from the “one-size-fits-all” model in basic movement science. We further propose the use of this platform as a unifying statistical framework to characterize brain disorders of known etiology in relation to idiopathic neurological disorders with similar phenotypic manifestations.

A dynamic touch paradigm in which participants judged the lengths of rods and pipes was used to test the D. M. Jacobs and C. F. Michaels (2007) theory of perceptual learning. The theory portrays perception as the exploitation of a locus on an information manifold and learning as continuous movement across that manifold to a new locus, as guided by information available in feedback. The information manifold was defined as a 1-dimensional space of inertial variables. To encourage maximal learning, a 2-step procedure was used in each of 2 experiments. Each step comprised a pretest to identify the starting locus on the information manifold, a practice phase in which feedback specifying the optimal locus was given, and a posttest in which the ending locus on the manifold was identified. In the 2nd step, a different feedback variable specified a different optimum. In both experiments, participants, who sometimes began at different loci, showed the predicted movement toward the optimum in each phase. Whereas previous applications of the theory posit the existence of information-for-learning without identifying a candidate variable, such a candidate is identified.

In 1709, Berkeley hypothesized of the human that distance is measurable by 'the motion of his body, which is perceivable by touch'. To be sufficiently general and reliable, Berkeley's hypothesis must imply that distance measured by legged locomotion approximates actual distance, with the measure invariant to gait, speed and number of steps. We studied blindfolded human participants in a task in which they travelled by legged locomotion from a fixed starting point A to a variable terminus B, and then reproduced, by legged locomotion from B, the A-B distance. The outbound ('measure') and return ('report') gait could be the same or different, with similar or dissimilar step sizes and step frequencies.In five experiments we manipulated bipedal gait according to the primary versus secondary distinction revealed in symmetry group analyses of locomotion patterns. Berkeley's hypothesis held only when the measure and report gaits were of the same symmetry class, indicating that idiothetic distance measurement is gait-symmetry specific. Results suggest that human odometry (and perhaps animal odometry more generally) entails variables that encompass the limbs in coordination, such as global phase, and not variables at the level of the single limb, such as step length and step number, as traditionally assumed.

Successful action requires an animal to be in touch with its environment-to be able to perceive properties relevant to the accomplishment of the task at hand. Ecological psychology, the perspective adopted here, holds that patterns of stimulation embody information about these properties. Success at a task, then, implies attunement to such information, which may involve learning, or what the Gibsons called the education of attention (E. J. Gibson, 1969;J. J. Gibson, 1966). Asking perceivers to report on some property, then informing them of the actual value of the property, is one way to evoke changes in attunement and has been explicitly investigated in several recent studies (e.g., Jacobs, Runeson, & Michaels, 2001;Michaels, Arzamarski, Isenhower, & Jacobs, 2008;Michaels & de Vries, 1998;Smith, Flach, Dittman, & Stanard, 2001).The education of attention, however, cannot be the only process associated with a change in attunement, because perceiver-actors must achieve a large and diverse set of goals, each goal with its own informational basis. As a perceiver progresses from one goal-oriented action to the next, attention must rapidly shift among informational variables. Perceivers face the recurring challenge of turning themselves into appropriate information-detection devices (Turvey, 1988). Such shifts in intention, then, are a second factor that affects what information a perceiveractor will pick up. Given an intention to perceive some property, the attunement to certain information is entailed. Demonstrating this relationship has been thwarted by the lack of techniques for identifying the particular information that a perceiver is attending to, and how that attunement changes. Such techniques are becoming available;so, in what follows, we ask whether a change in intention expresses itself as informational reattunement. Although our primary interest is in learning and intention switching, we note, for completeness, that there is a third basis for changes in attunement. Attention can also be at the beck and call of environmental information: Information about certain events can draw attention. Such information is said to have attensity (see Shaw & McIntyre, 1974).We consider the effects of switching intention and educating attention using Jacobs and Michaels's (2007) ecological theory of perceptual learning, which they term direct learning. The theory has two key postulates: The first is that the variables that might lay an informational basis for a task constitute a continuous information space, and the second is that perceptual learning is an informationally guided movement through the space. For present purposes, information space provides a convenient means of measuring how changing intention and perceptual learning affect information use. The choice of experimental task derives from our recent application of direct learning to the dynamic touch paradigm (Michaels et al., 2008). In sum, the goal of the present contribution is to examine how changes in intention affect attunement within an information spac...