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

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 1980s, 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.