| Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 12, Iss. 2, Apr, 2008, pp. 163-190 @2008 Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences Entropy Conservation in the Control of Human Action Abstract: The human motor system is highly adaptable with the ability to adjust
its movement patterns under constantly changing task and environmental constraints.
In this paper we develop the position that the probabilistic nature of human action
can be characterized by entropies at the level of the organism, task, and environment.
Systematic changes in motor adaptation are characterized as task-organism and
environment-organism tradeoffs in entropy. Such compensatory adaptations lead
to a view of goal-directed motor control as the product of an underlying conservation
of entropy across the task-organism-environment system. The conservation of
entropy supports the view that context dependent adaptations in human goal-directed
action are guided fundamentally by natural law and provides a novel means of
examining human motor behavior. Keywords: information, entropy, redundancy, motor control, adaptation |