After the senses of an organism have provided information about the world to its brain,
how does its brain then translate this information into a physical reaction (i.e. bodily
movement) in response to stimuli, and how does the ability of an organism to produce
adaptive and accurate movements develop? An outstanding central problem concerns the
redundancy of effective movements, first pointed out by N.A. Bernstein. The human motor
system is mechanically complex and can make use of a large number of degrees of freedom.
The controlled operation of such a system requires a reduction of mechanical redundancy,
effectively by reducing the number of degrees of freedom. More recent work has shown that
this problem is hard to solve explicitly by computing solutions to the equations of motion
of the system. Equally challenging to traditional computational approaches is the fact
that motor systems show remarkable adaptability and flexibility in the presence of
changing biomechanical properties of motor organs during development and when faced with
different environmental conditions or tasks. Solutions to these problems would clearly
have a large impact on a variety of issues in child development. Modeling studies have
stressed the importance of the somatic selection of neuronal groups in maps for the
progressive transformation of a primary movement repertoire into a set of motor synergies
and adaptive action patterns. This idea was reinforced by computer simulations of a simple
motor system that worked according to such selectional principles. This approach suggested
a provisional solution to Bernstein’s problem and provided new parameters to guide
experimental approaches to the development of sensorimotor coordination. (See Publications
29 and 51.)
