Variability in the Timing of Stepping Movement

In order to investigate variability in the timing of human cyclic movement, we examined temporal parameters in stepping. Of 40 subjects, 22 were males (age: 23.0±2.6) and 18 were females (age: 23.2±1.7). They stepped at 10 or 5 kinds of tempos (steps/min) with either open or closed eyes. The CVs (coefficient of variation) of the temporal parameters were used to assess variability in timing. Sixteen of the 40 subjects also participated in a free stepping experiment. The results indicated that variability in the timing in the case of closed eyes was larger than in the case of open eyes, and variability in the timing of the non-dominant foot was larger than that of the dominant foot. We found that there are minimum CV tempos in the cases of both open and closed eyes (114.9±10.6 and 117.9±8.1 respectively), and there was no great difference between the minimum CV tempo and the tempo of free stepping in the case of open eyes.