ArticleCurrent biology : CB2022
General variability leads to specific adaptation toward optimal movement policies.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- The energetic cost of human standing balance and gait initiation over a range of natural postures.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Infants and Adults Are Sensitive to the Costs of Upright Versus Non-Upright Locomotion.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Real-Time Estimation of User Adaptation During Hip Exosuit-Assisted Walking Using Wearable Inertial Measurement Unit Data and Long Short-Term Memory Modeling.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Linking systemic metabolic state to long-term motor memory: Insights from respiratory exchange ratio and glucose manipulation.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Effects of Repeated Forward Versus Repeated Backward Sprint Training on Physical Fitness Measures in Youth Male Basketball Players.Sports (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Probing gait adaptations: The impact of aging on dynamic stability and reflex control mechanisms under varied weight-bearing conditions.European journal of applied physiology · 2025Article
- The individuality of plantar pressure indices enables the reduction of descriptive gait data required for diagnostic purposes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Human adaptation to adaptive machines converges to game-theoretic equilibria.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Detecting artificially impaired balance in human locomotion: metrics, perturbation effects and detection thresholds.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Quantifying altered oxygen kinetics and reducing metabolic test times for children with cerebral palsy: a dual-exponential Bayesian modeling approach.Journal of applied physiology (Bethesda, Md. : 1985) · 2025Article
- Behavioural energetics in human locomotion: how energy use influences how we move.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Review
- Vestibular patients generate more regular head movements than healthy individuals during gaze-stabilization exercises.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Controlling a simple model of bipedal walking to adapt to a wide range of target step lengths and step frequencies.PloS one · 2025Article
- The effects of weight-bearing manipulations on gait and its underlying neural control mechanisms in toe walking children.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Muscular, temporal, and spatial responses to shoulder exosuit assistance during functional tasks.Journal of neurophysiology · 2024Article
- Ethnokinesiology: towards a neuromechanical understanding of cultural differences in movement.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Review
- Ground reaction forces better than center of pressure differentiate postural control between young female volleyball players and untrained peers.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Optimizing exoskeleton assistance to improve walking speed and energy economy for older adults.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Our nervous systems can learn optimal control policies in response to changes to our bodies, tasks, and movement contexts. For example, humans can learn to adapt their control policy in walking contexts where the energy-optimal policy is shifted along variables such as step frequency or step width. However, it is unclear how the nervous system determines which ways to adapt its control policy. Here, we asked how human participants explore through variations in their control policy to identify more optimal policies in new contexts. We created new contexts using exoskeletons that apply assistive torques to each ankle at each walking step. We analyzed four variables that spanned the levels of the whole movement, the joint, and the muscle: step frequency, ankle angle range, total soleus activity, and total medial gastrocnemius activity. We found that, across all of these analyzed variables, variability increased upon initial exposure to new contexts and then decreased with experience. This led to adaptive changes in the magnitude of specific variables, and these changes were correlated with reduced energetic cost. The timescales by which adaptive changes progressed and variability decreased were faster for some variables than others, suggesting a reduced search space within which the nervous system continues to optimize its policy. These collective findings support the principle that exploration through general variability leads to specific adaptation toward optimal movement policies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.