Evaluating the coordination dynamics of handwriting

Making decisions with a continuous mind

“…In economics, principles of self-organization have been applied as an explanation for the complexity of macro-and microeconomics (Arthur, 1999;Rosser, 1999Rosser, , 2007. In psychology and neuroscience, recent research has included studies of leadership behavior (Guastello & Bond, 2007), self-esteem (Delignières, Fortes, & Ninot, 2004), self-control (Warren, Sprott, & Hawkins, 2002), emotion (Lewis, 2000(Lewis, , 2005, empathy (Guastello, Pincus, & Gunderson, 2006), motor development and coordination (Athènes, Sallagoïty, Zanone, & Albaret, 2004;Bardy, Oullier, Bootsma, & Stoffregen, 2002;Clearfield, Diedrich, Smith, & Thelen, 2006;Kelso & Zanone, 2002;Lagarde & Kelso, 2006), cognitive development (Thelen et al, 2001), social development (Granic & Patterson, 2006), judgment (van Rooij & Bongers, 2000), learning (Churchill, 2008;de Bot, Lowie, & Verspoor, 2007;Kostrubiec, Tallet, & Zanone, 2006), language and speech (Almonte, Jirsa, Large, & Tuller, 2005;McDougall, 2006), dynamic adaptation in complex tasks (Kozma, Harter, & Achunala, 2007), perception (Giraudo & Pailhous, 1999;Rodriguez et al, 1999), and neural coordination (Freeman, 2003;Kerick, Hatfield, & Allender, 2007;Varela, Lachaux, Rodriguez, & Martinerie, 2001). Evidence for a self-organizing basis of cognition has also been provided by a large number of modeling studies simulating empirical data, covering a diverse collection of topics-for example, language (Elman, 2004;Farrar & Van Orden, 2001;…”

Motor coordination dynamics underlying graphic motion in 7- to 11-year-old children

“…To have a comparable measure across the two scans, the relative phase was treated after an appropriate clockwise rotation of 45°of the trajectories sampled by the tablet (for details, see Appendix in Athènes et al, 2004). The produced relative phase was calculated through a Hilbert transform.…”

“…The oblique scan corresponds to the variation of the relative phase from 0°to 180°by 15°steps between the x and y oscillators. For the sake of simplicity, the cardinal scan can be viewed as the variation of the relative phase from 0°to 180°by 15°steps between two similar orthogonal oscillators in an x'-y' reference system rotated counterclockwise by 45°(for an explicit treatment, see Appendix in Athènes et al, 2004). All shapes were inscribed within a square with a side length of 2 cm.…”

“…In a first approximation, they were deemed to represent the motion of the wrist and fingers, respectively. Expanding on this model, Athènes, Sallagoïty, Zanone, and Albaret (2004) proposed that the trajectory actually results from the nonlinear coupling of oscillators, that is, a mutual influence that renders the motion of the oscillators to some extent determined by each other. One important consequence of such a coupling is that the process of generating trajectories is not equally stable, so that some of the resulting traces will be more consistent, more accurate, swifter, and easier to produce than others, corresponding to what we would coin as preferred shapes.…”

Quantification of handwriting performance: Development of a force acquisition pen for measuring hand-grip and pen tip forces

“…People with one or more deficiencies in these functions are said to have dysgraphia. Numerous methods have been proposed for the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of handwriting performance [4,5,7,9,14,15,27,35,36,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. Teachers and parents are mainly concerned with the legibility or quality of writing.…”