From action representation to action execution: exploring the links between cognitive and biomechanical levels of motor control

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From action representation to action execution: exploring the links between cognitive and biomechanical levels of motor control

William M. Land^1,2,3*, Dima Volchenkov^3,4, Bettina E. Bläsing^1,2,3 and Thomas Schack^1,2,3

• ¹Department of Neurocognition and Action Biomechanics, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany
• ²Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany
• ³Cognitive Interaction Technology - Center of Excellence (CITEC), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany
• ⁴Department of Physics, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Along with superior performance, research indicates that expertise is associated with a number of mediating cognitive adaptations. To this extent, extensive practice is associated with the development of general and task-specific mental representations, which play an important role in the organization and control of action. Recently, new experimental methods have been developed, which allow for investigating the organization and structure of these representations, along with the functional structure of the movement kinematics. In the current article, we present a new approach for examining the overlap between skill representations and motor output. In doing so, we first present an architecture model, which addresses links between biomechanical and cognitive levels of motor control. Next, we review the state of the art in assessing memory structures underlying complex action. Following we present a new spatio-temporal decomposition method for illuminating the functional structure of movement kinematics, and finally, we apply these methods to investigate the overlap between the structure of motor representations in memory and their corresponding kinematic structures. Our aim is to understand the extent to which the output at a kinematic level is governed by representations at a cognitive level of motor control.

Introduction

Research on expertise in sports has shown that skilled performance is based not only on physical ability, but equally on task-specific cognitive competences. During extensive practice, relevant mental representations are formed, adapted, and re-organized in such a way that flawless performance is progressively facilitated, based on increasing order formation in the athlete's long-term memory. According to the perceptual-cognitive perspective, actions are planned and performed on the basis of structured cognitive representations of action effects in motor memory (Hommel et al., 2001; Mechsner et al., 2001; Schack and Mechsner, 2006; Hoffmann et al., 2007; Shin et al., 2010). Furthermore, because these representations govern the tuning of motor commands and muscular activity patterns, skillful coordination occurs when appropriate mental representations of the motor task and action goals are constructed (Schack and Ritter, in press). In order to illustrate how these processes can be conceptualized and explored empirically, we will present studies that investigated the organization of task-related cognitive structures, and the way these structures correspond to functional components of skilled motor performance. Additionally, we will present a new empirical approach for linking these mental structures to the structures observed within the movement kinematics. Before we turn to the methodological aspects of these studies, we will first present the underlying theoretical conceptualization of the cognitive architecture of human motor action, beginning with the concept of mental representations, which is fundamental to this approach.

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Being primarily concerned with the movement on its largest scale, we note that its structure is determined in (2) by the spatial arrangement of vectors ρ→(1)k in association with the markers k = 1, …, N. For each marker, the magnitude of the vector ‖ρ→(1)k‖⋅∑τ=t1tT∣∣γs(τ)∣∣ can be considered as a relative measure of its mobility on the movement scale σ_s. The degree of affinity between a pair of markers, k₁ and k₂, can be attested on the largest scale of the movement by means of the Euclidean distance between the related vectors,

d(k1,k2)=‖ρ→(1)k1−ρ→(1)k2‖(3)