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Asymmetric Walkway: A Novel Behavioral Assay for Studying Asymmetric Locomotion
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Do humans optimally exploit redundancy to control step variability in walking?

Jonathan B Dingwell1, Joby John, Joseph P Cusumano

  • 1Department of Kinesiology, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, United States of America. jdingwell@mail.utexas.edu

Plos Computational Biology
|July 27, 2010
PubMed
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Human walking adapts stride-by-stride to maintain constant speed, correcting relevant deviations while allowing others. This strategy, distinct from minimizing energy, ensures robust gait control.

Area of Science:

  • Biomechanics
  • Human motor control
  • Gait analysis

Background:

  • Human and animal locomotion principles focus on minimizing energetic cost.
  • Existing models do not fully explain observed variability in walking patterns.
  • Robust walking requires real-time adaptation at each step, not just average optimization.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop an analytical framework reconciling optimality, redundancy, and stochasticity in walking.
  • To define and test a control strategy for maintaining constant speed at each stride.
  • To investigate the governing principles of stride-to-stride variability in human walking.

Main Methods:

  • Defined a goal function for constant speed maintenance during human treadmill walking.
  • Recorded stride times and lengths from healthy subjects across five walking speeds.

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Last Updated: Jun 10, 2026

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Asymmetric Walkway: A Novel Behavioral Assay for Studying Asymmetric Locomotion

Published on: January 15, 2016

Using a Split-belt Treadmill to Evaluate Generalization of Human Locomotor Adaptation
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Using a Split-belt Treadmill to Evaluate Generalization of Human Locomotor Adaptation

Published on: August 23, 2017

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  • Developed stochastic control models based on the Minimum Intervention Principle and analyzed surrogate data sets.

    • Main Results:

    • Subjects showed reduced variability in goal-relevant gait fluctuations and increased variability in goal-irrelevant ones.
    • Humans immediately corrected goal-relevant deviations but allowed goal-irrelevant ones to persist.
    • Healthy humans slightly over-correct deviations, indicating a strategy beyond simple optimality or energy minimization.

    Conclusions:

    • A new principle governs stride-to-stride fluctuations, operating parallel to energy minimization.
    • Humans exploit task redundancies for robust control, balancing effort minimization with motor variability.
    • The findings reveal a distinct strategy for regulating gait variability in human walking.