COORDINATION DURING INITIAL ACQUISITION OF THREE-BALL JUGGLING

Abstract

Bimanual coordination is critical for the performance of a number of continuous skills (e.g., walking, running, drumming, etc.). However, relatively little is known about how such coordination is developed and maintained. In the current study researchers sought to address this issue by examining coordination changes in bilateral elbow motion during initial acquisition of three-ball cascade juggling. Elbow motion was assessed using a set of both traditional (Average Amplitude; Avg. Amp) and more recently developed nonlinear time-series analyses (Approximate Entropy; ApEn – a measure of complexity within a single time series, and Average Mutual Information; AMI – the amount of information shared between two time-series) (Abarbanel, 1996; Pincus, 1995). It was hoped that together these analyses would lend new insights about bimanual coordination in continuous skills that could be used to develop more sophisticated biomechanical models of human movement and/or advance general motor theory