movement communicability lecture slides

Movement Communication & Miscommunication

This is the text from slides that Asia used in her communication with Paul Cisek.


Phase	Action	Focus
1. Initial Development	Developed by the method’s founder	Safe and effective physical skill acquisition
2. Iterative Refinement	Continuously modified in interaction with 10,000+ learners over 10 years	Minimizing ambiguity, maximizing ’communicability’
3. Reverse Engineering	Analysis of the phase 2 output	Formalization, mechanistic explanation

Movement Communicability Framework

Definition:

How effectively movement instructions translate into execution

Core Formula:

Instructor has n parameters in mind (explicit + implicit)
Student executes movement matching m parameters
Communicability Index = m/n (closer to 1 = better communication)

Failure Modes:

1. No Requirement for Communicability

Movement for fun / lack of experience / other constraints
Most typical situation across non-pro movement training environments

2. Under-specification

Student interprets instructions/fills the specification gaps based on prior experience
Example: “Lift your arms” → student lifts shoulders/ribcage (wasn’t told not to)
Fixable with better cueing

3. Capacity Limitation ← Primary bottleneck

Student cannot access sensory information needed to execute
Example: “Tilt forward with straight spine” → cannot detect spinal position
No amount of specification fixes this. Solution requires developing perceptual skills, not just better cueing

Implication for Affordance Competition:

•Movement communicability requires shared perceptual landscape between instructor and student
•Without perceptual capacity, affordances literally aren’t available to compete
•Training must expand the perceptual field before movement selection can improve

“EVEN THE NOSE”

Referencing Steven Grosberg’s DIRECT model:

Learning in the DIRECT model(Fig.27, right panel) clarifies how a crucial motor-equivalence property of arm movement control is achieved; namely, during movement planning, either arm, or even the nose**, could be moved to the goal object, depending on which movement system receives a GO signal**.

This fact implies that trajectory planning does not just combine the position of the target on the retinas with the motorically-computed positions of the eyes in the head, and the head in the body, to compute a body-centered representation of the target position that can command a movement of an arm. Instead, these visual and motor signals are first combined to learn a representation of space around the actor. The position of the target in these spatial coordinates can then be downloaded into motor commands for moving the different limbs under volitional control. This spatial representation is computed in parietal cortex.

GOAL SETTING / ACTION SPECIFICATION

Habitual Movement: Mostly Inverse kinematics Baseworks: Mostly Forward kinematics

( Graphic shows two identical images of the star form with pink dots placed at the feet, hands, and hand; in a separate image additional blue dots are placed on other body landmarks such as knees, hips, several on the spine, on shoulders, elbows, and so on )

Neural Bottleneck in Affordance Competition

Affordance Competition Framework

•Multiple potential actions compete for selection
•Competition biased by PFC/BG based on goal understanding/context
•Specification happens in parallel via sensorimotor transformation

Our Classroom Realities

Problem: Perceptual capacity limits what affordances are “available” to compete

•Competition requires perceptually distinct affordances
•If front-parietal maps cannot discriminate movement variants → they collapse into single option
•Perceptual training expands the competitive landscape by making previously indistinguishable actions separable

Developmental Sequence:

•Perceptual differentiation (PPC) must mature first
•Then action selection mechanisms (BG) can learn to bias between now-distinguishable options
•Then contextual understanding (ITC) can influence goal-based (PFC) selection appropriately

BASEWORKS PRINCIPLES


TABLE 2. Principles The following principles were defined based on the analysis of the recurring movement patterns and mapped onto the perceptual skills they primarily target.
Principle	Description	Movement Pattern Type	Corresponding Perceptual Skills
Distributed Activation (DA)	Activate as many muscles as possible at the same time in any movement, but at low level. Achieved via performing multiple competing movements.	Micro	“Proprioceptive” (Localized Somatosensory)
Micro Movements (MM)	Keep “repeating” the movements that establish DA, as if “tracing” around the current macro-position.	Micro
Gridlines & Symmetry (GS)	In macro-movements, imagine gridlines in your peripersonal space and trace those gridlines with various body points (hipbones, the bottom of the ribcage, etc.)	Macro	Spatial
Fixing-Separating-Isolating (FSA)	Whenever moving, isolate one joint movement at a time (which results in forward kinematics rather than inverse kinematics). Use DA to stabilize the non-moving part prior to initiating movement.	Macro
Natural Breathing (NB)	Keep the breathing “neutral” (as when having a conversation), even when performing movements that require more effort.	NA	Interoceptive (Self-regulation)
Intensity Modification (IM)	Modify the intensity (in terms of ROM or effort) to comply with (1) NB, (2) GS and FSA (“stop” progression of the movement when you “hit” pain threshold or a morphological limitation; don’t disrupt the symmetry) → Target position is unknown	NA

The mystery of proprioceptive awarenes

Reuse the diagram from the “Mystery of Proprioceptive Awareness” article, emphasizing that awareness of proprioceptive signals as localized sensations is not a commonly recognized concept.

2025 Conference Posters Data

Several slides present data from the 2025 conference posters

perceptual difficulty

a slide shows step-by-step performance of squat with a quote:

“I found it very difficult and confusing. It is really hard to tell if my body is doing what is being described.”
/ A real student’s feedback

this is followed by a few more slides showing Baseworks tasks

MY QUESTIONS TO PAUL CISEK

1.Does the convergence on perceptual skill training when optimizing for communicability follow naturally from the predictions of affordance competition?
2.Could low-level muscular sensations at rest constitute useful sensory evidence for action selection, explaining why their detectability varies so widely?
3.Is muscle-specific sensory “splitting” plausibly related to behaviorally induced changes in S1 or parietal representations?
4.Could the intrinsically rewarding nature of heightened spatial awareness suggest a better integration between “idiosyncratic” action maps or that perceiving affordances is itself a source of aesthetic/reward value?