Abstract des Autors

In the last decade, the number of papers devoted to motor coordination has considerably increased. For a long time, the theoretical construct proposed to explain the mechanisms subserving movement coordination in human and animal have been built exclusively on the hypothesis of the existence of motor programs or hard-wired central pattern generators (CPG) stored in the nervous system. Recently, the hypothesis that 'coordinative structures' which could be temporarily assembled as a function of task specific constraints has been related to a shift in interest towards the identification of general (abstracts) principles subserving 'selective' elaboration of particular modes of coordination rather than others. In such a context it seems to us logical and useful to dedicate a special issue of IJSP to motor coordination, owing to the tight link between motor coordination and sporting skills. The contributions that we have chosen aim to elucidate the mechanisms subserving the production of three types of coordination mainly encountered in sport contexts: subject environment coordination, multi limb coordination and between-subject coordination. The authors have been invited to base their contributions using, in part, their recent works but also using a large review of literature in the domain of interest. Six main points were tackled by the contributors: the role if task constraints in the emergence of invariants in self-timing interceptive tasks; the dynamic concepts and tools to analyze hand-ball trajectories coordination in self-paced timing tasks; the continuous regulation through perception-action coupling in coordination between subjects and environment; a dynamical systems theory approach of acquisition of complex inter-limb and whole body coordination in sport; how does cognition work in self-organized dynamics?; between people coordination in sport. Verf.-Referat