The Human-Body-in-Coordination as Perceptual Instrument

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that the human body in locomotor coordination performs dual roles, acting to propel the body over the surface of support, and embodying haptic information arising from and specific to the movement of the body as a whole with respect to the substrate. Here we show that blindfolded human subjects, trained to crawl using gait patterns that differed in the spatio-temporal symmetries defined with respect to the arms and legs in coordination, perceived distance travelled quadrupedally. These results suggest that 1) the body in coordination gives rise to a haptic measure of how one is moving through the world relative to the substrate and 2) that the measure that results is specific to the softly assembled global organization of the locomotor action system.