Heymans Colloquium Vivien Marmelat

Lecturer

Vivien Marmelat, MSc (Université Montpellier 1, France)

Title

Synchronization between complex systems: matching of fractal exponents suggests strong anticipation processes

Abstract

My work focuses on the synchronization between “complex systems”, i.e. systems presenting 1/f fluctuations within observed time series. The major hypothesis is that synchronization processes are very different when a human has to synchronize with a complex (1/f) or with a simple (periodic) environment. When the environment is simple, the organism can predict future events by the construction of an internal model of the short-term regularities of the environment (referred by Dubois (2001) as “weak anticipation”). Strong anticipation, in contrast, is supposed to occur without reference to any internal model. (Stephen and Dixon 2011; Stepp and Turvey 2010).

From this point of view, anticipation is based on the embedding of the organism within its environment: this embedding creates a new, organism–environment system, which possesses lawful regularities that allow the emergence of anticipation. Stephen et al. (2008; 2011) suggested that a correlati! on betwe en fractal exponents of environment and organism should be a hallmark of strong anticipation. Moreover this scaling attunement should not be the consequence of local mimicking, but should reveal a more global, non-local synchronization on a large range of time scales. I will present some results where we argue that strong anticipation occurred: inter-personal synchronization (Marmelat and Delignières, 2012), walking paced by biological (1/f) variable metronomes, or walking paced by variable metronomes with different structures (anti-correlations, no correlations, long-range correlations). Briefly, results showed that fractal pacing conditions preserve typical long-range correlations in inter-stride intervals, qualitatively different from the isochronous condition, but comparable to the self-paced gait. Moreover we found a close matching of the long-term correlation structures of inter-stride intervals and inter-stimuli intervals in the four fractals pacing conditions.

For more information you may contact prof. dr. P.L.C. (Paul) van Geert, email address: p.l.c.van.geert rug.nl