Meeting Abstract
The locomotion of many animal species, mammalian quadruped walking and cockroach running as examples, appears to be associated with a “posture principle”, wherein motion is restricted to a family of postures that is consistent across a range of speeds. Often this observation has been made in conjunction with the “templates and anchors” hypothesis that claims animals use control and dynamics to reduce the complexity of their body (anchor) motions to follow that of a simpler (template) system. Our recent work in dynamical systems theory suggests a universal, systematic method exists for anchoring templates that would follow such a “posture principle”. We propose an assay to test for: (1) the presence of a posture principle; (2) the posture-based anchoring strategy our theoretical results suggest. If posture-based anchoring is found, it would suggest that position sensing could be used for anchoring with little or no support from velocity sensing, suggesting implications for the neuroanatomy and sensory physiology associated with locomotion.
