ABSTRACT
Following Bernstein, we have in the last two chapters proposed a view of motor control whose strategy is to leave as little explanatory power as possible residing in a “homunculus.” In older models, this theoretical entity was asked to make an overwhelming number of decisions (about individual muscle states), requiring an overwhelming amount of information (about the state of the body and the world). The job of dealing with all possible combinations of perceptual states is equal in difficulty to (and just as intractable as) the job of dealing with all combinations of muscle states. Bernstein saw these as complementary problems; it is the perceptual side of the dilemma that we address in this chapter. We have seen how a coordinative structure style of organization can reduce the number of executive decisions that need to be made. Now we want to see how the perceptual information can modulate or tune the coordinative structures without intervention from a super-human homunculus.
