Amsterdam Movement Sciences

The redundancy in the neuromuscular system provides the opportunity to perform many functional movements but also increases the demands on the neuromuscular system to control all muscles involved in everyday whole-body movements. Presumably, muscles are controlled as (a limited set of) motor modules dependent on the task performed, reducing the degrees of freedom to that of synchronised activity in the neuromuscular system. In this thesis, electromyography was recorded and muscle synergies, information decomposition and intermuscular coherence were combined with network analysis to study the clustering of motor activity in both adults and toddlers. Functional, anatomical and neural connectivity shapes synchronised muscle activity and induces a modular control structure. This involves distinct neural pathways that complementary activate spinal motor neurons. The insights gained when studying healthy movement advocate the use of time and frequency domain analysis in combination with a network approach. This combination clearly provides the opportunity to disentangle information about the activity of multiple muscles and, by this, the control of movement.