Professor Tsaneva-Atanasova at ACAPS 2021

In October 2021 Professor Tsaneva-Atanasova gave a plenary talk entitled 'Identifying and Quantifying Movement Signatures'.

Human movement has been studied for decades, and dynamic laws of motion that are common to all humans have been derived.

In an effort to establish reliable indicators of schizophrenia we developed a method that could detect deficits in movement and social interactions, both characteristics of the disorder. We asked people to perform movements alone, and to mirror the movements of a computer avatar or a humanoid robot. Using statistical learning we were able to distinguish people with schizophrenia from healthy participants with accuracy and specificity slightly better than clinical interviews and comparable to tests based on much more expensive neuroimaging methods [2].

Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) struggle with the acquisition of coordinated motorskills. We assessed how individual coordination solutions might emerge following an intervention that trained accurate gaze control in a throw and catch task. Kinematic data were collected from six upper body sensors from twenty-one children with DCD, using a 3D motion analysis system, before and after a 4-week training intervention. The gaze trained group revealed significantly higher total coordination following training than a technique-trained control group. Additionally, the gaze trained group revealed individual coordination patterns for successful catch attempts that were different from all the coordination patterns before training, whereas the control group did not [3]. Finally, I will present some unpublished results related to movement ‘signatures’ of the eye, arms, and hands which might underpin DCD.

[1] Słowiński P, Zhai C, Alderisio F, Salesse R, Gueugnon M, Marin L, Bardy BG, di Bernardo M, Tsaneva-Atanasova K. (2016) Dynamic similarity promotes interpersonal coordination in joint action, Journal of The Royal Society Interface, volume 13, no. 116[2] Słowiński, P., Alderisio, F., Zhai, C., Shen, Y., Tino, P., Bortolon, C., ... & Tsaneva-Atanasova, K. (2017). Unravelling socio-motor biomarkers in schizophrenia. npj Schizophrenia, 3(1), 1-10.[3] Słowiński P, Baldemir H, Wood G, Alizadehkhaiyat O, Coyles G, Vine S, Williams G, Tsaneva-Atanasova K, Wilson M. (2019) Gaze training supports self-organization of movement coordination in children with developmental coordination disorder, Scientific Reports, volume 9, no. 1, pages 1712-171