Rhythmic auditory stimuli modulates movement recovery to perturbation during locomotion [METHODS [amp ] TECHNIQUES]

Deepak K. Ravi, Marc Bartholet, Andreas Skiadopoulos, Jenny A. Kent, Jordan Wickstrom, William R. Taylor, Navrag B. Singh, and Nick Stergiou The capacity to recover after a perturbation is a well-known intrinsic property of physiological systems, including the locomotor system, and can be termed resilience. Despite an abundance of metrics proposed to measure the complex dynamics of bipedal locomotion, analytical tools for quantifying resilience are lacking. Here, we introduce a novel method to directly quantify resilience to perturbations during locomotion. We examine the extent to which synchronizing stepping with two different temporal structured auditory stimuli (periodic and 1/f structure) during walking modulates resilience to a large unexpected perturbation. Recovery time after perturbation was calculated from the horizontal velocity of body's center of mass. Our results indicate that synchronizing stepping with 1/f stimulus elicited greater resilience to mechanical perturbations during walking compared to the periodic stimulus (3.3 seconds faster). Our proposed method may help to gain a comprehensive understanding of movement recovery behavior of humans and other animals in their ecological contexts.

Source: Journal of Experimental Biology - February 3, 2021 Category: Biology Authors: Ravi, D. K., Bartholet, M., Skiadopoulos, A., Kent, J. A., Wickstrom, J., Taylor, W. R., Singh, N. B., Stergiou, N. Tags: METHODS [amp ] TECHNIQUES Source Type: research