Effects of time-delay in a model of intra- and inter-personal motor coordination

TL;DR

This paper investigates how introducing a time delay in a well-known nonlinear oscillator model affects motor coordination dynamics, revealing increased bistability between coordination modes especially with frequency differences.

Contribution

It provides a bifurcation analysis of a delayed coupled oscillator model, highlighting the impact of delay on coordination stability and dynamics.

Findings

Delay significantly alters the system's bifurcation structure.

Increased bistability between in-phase and anti-phase oscillations.

Delay effects are amplified with frequency detuning.

Abstract

Motor coordination is an important feature of intra- and inter-personal interactions, and several scenarios --- from finger tapping to human-computer interfaces --- have been investigated experimentally. In the 1980, Haken, Kelso and Bunz formulated a coupled nonlinear two-oscillator model, which has been shown to describe many observed aspects of coordination tasks. We present here a bifurcation study of this model, where we consider a delay in the coupling. The delay is shown to have a significant effect on the observed dynamics. In particular, we find a much larger degree of bistablility between in-phase and anti-phase oscillations in the presence of a frequency detuning.