coordinate dependence of variability analysis协调可变性分析的依赖.pdfVIP

Coordinate Dependence of Variability Analysis 1,2,3 1 ¨ 4 5,6 Dagmar Sternad *, Se-Woong Park , Hermann Muller , Neville Hogan 1 Department of Biology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 2 Department of Electrical Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, 4 Department of Movement Science, Justus-Liebig University, Giessen, Germany, 5 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, 6 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America Abstract Analysis of motor performance variability in tasks with redundancy affords insight about synergies underlying central nervous system (CNS) control. Preferential distribution of variability in ways that minimally affect task performance suggests sophisticated neural control. Unfortunately, in the analysis of variability the choice of coordinates used to represent multi- dimensional data may profoundly affect analysis, introducing an arbitrariness which compromises its conclusions. This paper assesses the influence of coordinates. Methods based on analyzing a covariance matrix are fundamentally dependent on an investigator’s choices. Two reasons are identified: using anisotropy of a covariance matrix as evidence of preferential distribution of variability; and using orthogonality to quantify relevance of variability to task performance. Both are exquisitely sensitive to coord