UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

Browse

Filters

20171

Settings

Author: search.filters.author.Rafiee, ShakibaSubject: search.filters.subject.Motor Control

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Lower-Body Mechanical Perturbation of Gait to Identify Neural Control
    (2017) Rafiee, Shakiba; Kiemel, Tim; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Neural feedback plays a key role in maintaining locomotor stability in face of perturbations. In this study, we systematically identified properties of neural feedback that contribute to stabilizing human walking by examining how the nervous system responds to small kinematic deviations away from the desired gait pattern. We applied small continuous mechanical perturbation, forces at the ankles, as well as small continuous sensory perturbation, movement of a virtual visual scene, in order to compare how neural feedback responds to actual and illusory kinematic deviations. Computing phase-dependent impulse response functions (φIRFs) that describe kinematic and muscular responses to small brief perturbations (impulses), enabled us to identify critical phases of the gait cycle when the nervous system modulates muscle activity. In particular, our results suggest that an early-stance modulation of anterior leg-muscles is a general control mechanism that serves multiple functions, including controlling walking speed and compensating for errors in foot placement.