Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bernstein was one of the great neuroscientists of the twentieth century and highly respected by Western scientists even though most have never read his most important book entitled On the Construction of Movements. Bernstein's Construction of Movements: The Original Text and Commentaries is the first English translation. It supplements the translated text with a series of commentaries by scientists who knew Bernstein personally, as well as leaders in related fields including physics, motor control, and biomechanics. While written in 1947, Bernstein’s book is anything but obsolete, making this English translation and accompanying commentaries an invaluable text. The translated original text presents in detail Bernstein’s views on the evolutionary history of biological movement and his multi-level hierarchical scheme of the construction of movements in higher animals, including humans. The following commentaries address Bernstein’s personality, the history of the book, and current views on different aspects of neuroscience covered in Bernstein’s text. Ultimately, they present "a book within the book" to showcase how Bernstein’s heritage has developed over the past years. This classic, available for the first time to an English-speaking audience, will prove beneficial to students, instructors, and experts of neuroscience, physics, neurophysiology, motor control, motor rehabilitation, biomechanics, dynamical systems, and related fields.

Mechanical laws of motion were applied very early for better understanding anthropomorphic action as suggested in advance by Newton «For from hence are easily deduced the forces of machines, which are compounded of wheels, pullies, levers, cords, and weights, ascending directly or obliquely, and other mechanical powers; as also the force of the tendons to move the bones of animals». In the 19th century E.J. Marey and E. Muybridge introduced chronophotography to scientifically investigate animal and human movements. They opened the field of motion analysis by being the first scientists to correlate ground reaction forces with kinetics. Despite of the apparent simplicity of a given skilled movement, the organization of the underlying neuro-musculo-skeletal system remains unknown. A reason is the redundancy of the motor system: a given action can be realized by different muscle and joint activity patterns, and the same underlying activity may give rise to several movements. After the pioneering work of N. Bernstein in the 60’s on the existence of motor synergies, numerous researchers «walking on the border» of their disciplines tend to discover laws and principles underlying the human motions and how the brain reduces the redundancy of the system. These synergies represent the fundamental building blocks composing complex movements. In robotics, researchers face the same redundancy and complexity challenges as the researchers in life sciences. This book gathers works of roboticists and researchers in biomechanics in order to promote an interdisciplinary research on anthropomorphic systems at large and on humanoid robotics in particular.

This volume surveys three decades of modern robot control theory and describes how the work of Suguru Arimoto shaped its development. Twelve survey articles written by experts associated with Suguru Arimoto at various stages in his career treat the subject comprehensively. This book provides an important reference for graduate students and researchers, as well as for mathematicians, engineers and scientists whose work involves robot control theory.

This book provides a description of the current theory and methodology of LEGO-based therapy (LBT) for social development. It is intended for all readers who have an interest in LBT and both how and why it works to improve the development of social communication and interpersonal collaboration. This work provides an update from previous publications on LBT methods and offers the first in-depth discussion of the theoretical basis for the LBT model. Educators, therapists, parents, and administrators will gain a clearer understanding of how LBT can be used to improve social adjustment and initiate participation in social learning, creativity, and interpersonal synergy. Regardless of the context in which LEGO materials are used to facilitate improvement in interpersonal communication and collaboration, this book is a core text, describing the current strategies and benefits of LBT.

Complexity and Control in Team Sports is the first book to apply complex systems theory to ‘soccer-like’ team games (including basketball, handball and hockey) and to present a framework for understanding and managing the elite sports team as a multi-level complex system. Conventional organizational studies have tended to define team sports as a set of highly heterogeneous physical, mental and cognitive activities within which it is difficult, if not impossible, to find common behavioural playing regularities or universal pedagogies for controlling those activities. Adopting a whole system approach, and exploring the concepts of control, regulation and self-organization, this book argues that it is possible for coaches, managers and psychologists to develop a better understanding of how a complex system works, and therefore, to more successfully manage and influence a team’s performance. This book draws on literature from the biological, behavioural and social sciences, including, psychology, sociology and sports performance analysis, to develop a detailed, interdisciplinary and multi-level picture of the elite sports team. It analyzes behaviour across five inter-connected levels: the team as a ‘managed institution’; coaching staff controlling players via cybernetic flows; the team as a playing unit; the individual player as a complex dynamic system expressed through behaviour; and a player’s complex physiological/biological system. Drawing these together, the book throws fascinating new light on the elite sports team and will be useful reading for all students, researchers or professionals with an interest in sport psychology, sport management, sport coaching, sport performance analysis or complex systems theory.

Political sociology is the interdisciplinary study of power and the intersection of personality, society and politics. The field also examines how the political process is affected by major social trends as well as exploring how social policies are altered by various social forces. Political sociologists increasingly use a wide variety of relatively new quantitative and qualitative methodologies and incorporate theories and research from other social science cognate disciplines. The contributors focus on the current controversies and disagreements surrounding the use of different methodologies for the study of politics and society, and discussions of specific applications found in the widely scattered literature where substantive research in the field is published. This approach will solidly place the handbook in a market niche that is not occupied by the current volumes while also covering many of the same theoretical and historical developments that the other volumes cover. The purpose of this handbook is to summarize state-of-the-art theory, research, and methods used in the study of politics and society. This area of research encompasses a wide variety of perspectives and methods that span social science disciplines. The handbook is designed to reflect that diversity in content, method and focus. In addition, it will cover developments in the developed and underdeveloped worlds.

The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in the volume has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modelling or explanations based on abstract, general, universal laws of human behavior. It shows that 'context matters' in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural and historical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. By showcasing scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, the Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factors systematically into account.

For years, the typical presentation of autism—the developmental delays, the social and linguistic deficits—has been well known. Despite great variation among children with this condition, certain symptoms are considered hallmarks of the disorder. Less understood is why these symptoms come together to construct autism. And as autism rates continue to rise, this information is ever more vital to accurate diagnosis and treatment. Autism and the Brain offers answers by showing a new neuropsychology of the autistic spectrum, reviewing general brain organization, and relating specific regions and structures to specific clinical symptoms. The author identifies deficiencies in areas of the left-hemisphere associated with the self and identity as central to autism. From this primary damage, the brain further reorganizes to compensate, explaining the diverse behaviors among low- and high-functioning individuals as well as autistic savants. The result is a unique three-dimensional view of brain structure, function, and pathology, with in-depth focus on how the autistic brain: Perceives the world. Understands and uses words. Perceives faces. Understands spatial relations and numbers. Understands feelings and registers emotions. Perceives the self as separate from others. Acts in the world. Challenging readers to re-think their assumptions, Autism and the Brain is breakthrough reading for researchers, clinicians, and graduate students in fields as varied as child and adolescent psychiatry; clinical child, school, and developmental psychology; neuroscience/neurobiology; special education and educational psychology; social work; communication disorders; and public health and policy.

Contributors of the 16 papers were charged with reviewing urgent problems of motor control rather than reporting on their own research, in order to produce a broad reference for professionals and graduate students in the field. Four of them worked directly with Nikolai Berstein (1896-1966), the Russian scientist who first worked in the field and wh.

Intellectual Journeys in Ecological Psychology: Interviews and Reflections from Pioneers in the Field presents 12 in-depth interviews with prominent scientists associated with Ecological Psychology, rooted in James Gibson’s radical approach to perception. Featuring a mix of interviews conducted around the turn of the millennium with leading figures of Ecological Psychology, the book reveals discussions not previously found in publications and authentic personal perspectives about the early days of Ecological Psychology, a significant paradigm of post-cognitivist psychology. The interviews are supplemented by current reflections that bridge the past to the present. Each interview chapter also contains a brief biography of the interviewee and a list of their top ten most significant publications. An introductory chapter by Harry Heft provides an overview of Gibson’s theory and the post-Gibsonian theoretical landscape. A further chapter by the editors highlights lineages and patterns in the scientific careers and work of the interviewees. An epilogue by William Warren concludes the volume, addressing the current state and directions of Ecological Psychology. In the Appendix photographs taken by Sverker Runeson in the 1960s and 1970s show scenes and actors from scientific event in Ecological Psychology. This book will be beneficial to all researchers and students in the international community of Ecological Psychology. It will also serve as a starting point for those who wish to learn more about the movement and origins of Ecological Psychology.