Coordination Dynamics Under Fire

Coordination dynamics has come under fire for a number of reasons, in part because of misunderstandings. First, the approach is often assumed to be more "ecological", in that it attempts to deal with more complex, so-called natural tasks. This is not true in general. Coordination dynamics is only more "ecological" in the sense that it aims to identify and study the simplest possible systems and tasks that contain the essential phenomena one is trying to understand. This reduction involves an act of creation, as Arthur Koestler would say, on the part of the scientist.

Second, coordination dynamics is often equated with "mere" biomechanics or "ordinary physics", perhaps because a popular experimental paradigm deals with swinging coupled pendulums. While the laws or rules of coordination arecertainly shaped by, and often incorporate biomechanical factors, they go beyond biomechanics, per se. While the laws or rules of coordination are certainly shaped by, and often incorporatebiomechanical factors, they go beyond biomechanics, per se. This is because the same rules or coordination dynamics (equations of motion for relevant coupling variable s) have been demonstrated to apply across very different systems.

This evidence of "universality" has led to a third misinterpretation: that because of the abstract nature of coordination dynamics the theory ignores the influence of specific biomechanical and neuromuscular factors. Yet only by studying coordination among materially different component parts and coupling media is it possible to establish laws of coordination in the first place. All instantiations of coordination laws are dependent upon particular mechanisms, themselves of course worthy of study.

Fourth, there have been certain murmurings in the literature about the ability of coordination dynamics "to deliver". This skepticism is unwarranted given the quite impoverished methods and experimental measurements available to earlier approaches and the corresponding growth of new techniques motivated by coordination dynamics (e.g. detailed measures of fluctuations in coordination variables, full exploration of the parameters affecting coordination, evaluation of intrinsic coordination tendencies prior to learning new skills, etc.). Moreover, no other approach has been able to explicitly connect the individual parts of the system and their specific properties, to the laws of coordination that govern their (nonlinear) interaction. In recent years, through a careful elaboration of theory and experiment, it has even proved possible to derive certain simple forms of coordinated behavior from known cellular and neural ensemble properties of the cerebral cortex, thereby opening up entirely new avenues of investigation and allowing us to traverse scales of neural and behavioral organization. Though not a theory of everything, coordination dynamics and the dynamic perspective in general, has much to contribute.

Some recent noteworthy extensions of the approach at the Center include: 1) how new degrees of freedom are selectively recruited (and others suppressed) to accomplish movement goals under changing environmental conditions; 2) how local sensory information from the environment is used to globally stabilize coordination states under conditions in which they would otherwise become unstable and change; and 3) how biological systems stabilize intrinsically unstable mechanical systems, as say, in learning to walk or ride a bicycle. A question on many people's lips is can the concepts, strategies and measures of self-organized coordination dynamics also handle cognition? This ill-posed question invites a dichotomy—central versus peripheral, mental versus physical, cognitive versus motor—that does not exist, and has never existed in coordination dynamics. Nevertheless, recent studies of cognitive strategy, attention, learning, memory and intentional behavioral change suggest an affirmative answer. The reason is that in coordination dynamics, at least at the behavioral level, any new information (e.g. a task to be learned, selective attention, memory) is expressed in the same space of variables that defines the pre-existing behavioral repertoire or knowledge base. "Representation" thus takes the form of meaningful informational variables and their dynamics, the origins of which likely lie in the co-evolved relationship between the organism and its environment, between perceiving and acting.