ArticleFrontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology2021
A Vexing Question in Motor Control: The Degrees of Freedom Problem.
Article in Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Post-Stroke Abnormal Synergies Are a Resultant Behavior of the Interplay of Weakness, Spasticity, and Environmental Demands.Neurorehabilitation and neural repair · 2026Review
- Mechanisms of Visuomotor Interception.Brain sciences · 2026Review
- The role of preparatory muscle activity in a one-step approach to vertical jumping.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Adaptation of Transcortical Responses in Upper Extremity Movements During an Elbow Visuomotor Tracking Task in Humans.Journal of functional morphology and kinesiology · 2025Article
- Older adults do not consistently overestimate their action opportunities across different settings.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A Computational Model of Hybrid Trunk-like Robots for Synergy Formation in Anticipation of Physical Interaction.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Syllable as a Synchronization Mechanism That Makes Human Speech Possible.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Deactivation and collective phasic muscular tuning for pointing direction: Insights from machine learning.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Neural Simulation of Actions for Serpentine Robots.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Designing and Analyzing In-Place Motor Tasks in Virtual Reality With Goal Functions.IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering : a publication of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society · 2024Article
- Artificial cognition vs. artificial intelligence for next-generation autonomous robotic agents.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2024Article
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Abstract
The human "marionette" is extremely complex and multi-articulated: anatomical redundancy (in terms of Degrees of Freedom: DoFs), kinematic redundancy (movements can have different trajectories, velocities, and accelerations and yet achieve the same goal, according to the principle of Motor Equivalence), and neurophysiological redundancy (many more muscles than DoFs and multiple motor units for each muscle). Although it is quite obvious that such abundance is not noxious at all because, in contrast, it is instrumental for motor learning, allowing the nervous system to "explore" the space of feasible actions before settling on an elegant and possibly optimal solution, the crucial question then boils down to figure out how the nervous system "chooses/selects/recruits/modulates" task-dependent subsets of countless assemblies of DoFs as functional motor synergies. Despite this daunting conceptual riddle, human purposive behavior in daily life activities is a proof of concept that solutions can be found easily and quickly by the embodied brain of the human cognitive agent. The point of view suggested in this essay is to frame the question above in the old-fashioned but still seminal observation by Marr and Poggio that cognitive agents should be regarded as
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