Definition
It has long been hypothesized that complex movements are generated by concatenating simpler, elementary movements in a serial order. This hypothesis seems intuitively obvious for motor behaviors such as speech, handwriting and typing, the elementary movements in these instances being the vocalization of phonemes, the generation of individual letters or strokes and the production of targeted keypresses. However, the hypothesis has been extended more generally to skilled motor tasks. With respect to this hypothesis several questions (that have been addressed experimentally to varying degrees) arise: (i) How is the proper serial order of elements in a sequence established? (ii) To what extent is there overlap between the expression of elements in the sequence and to what extent does the expression of one element depend on the preceding and succeeding movement in a sequence? and (iii) What are the properties of elemental movements?
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References
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Soechting, J.F. (2009). Movement Sequences. In: Binder, M.D., Hirokawa, N., Windhorst, U. (eds) Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-29678-2_3623
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-29678-2_3623
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