A synergetic theory of environmentally-specified and learned patterns of movement coordination. I. Relative phase dynamics

This paper outlines and applies a synergetic strategy to the coordination of human rhythmical movement. It extends earlier empirical and theoretical work to include the influence of specific environmental information and of memory on the dynamics of the collective variables (order parameters) that characterize the coordination patterns. Key ideas concern cooperative and competitive influences on the collective dynamics. Recent experiments on environmentally specified and learned rhythmic movement patterns are modeled explicitly on the level of the collective variable, relative phase. New predictions are presented and research directions proposed that follow directly from the present theoretical approach.