The Relational Influence of Constraints on the Coordination of a Natural Prehension Action

Acquiring coordination, according to Bernstein (1967) is “the mastery of the redundant degrees of freedom” (p. 127). When faced with a novel or complex movement problem, the organism is required to reorganize its coordination system, such that only a minimum number of degrees of freedom remain to be actively controlled. Bernstein argued that an initial solution to this problem would be ‘freezing out’ parts of the total set of the to-be-controlled variables.