Walking in a Width-Changing Virtual Corridor Affects Gait Variability

A poster presentation of the same width-changing virtual corridor study presented as a podium paper at GCMAS 2021 (see the “26th Annual Meeting of the Gait & Clinical Movement Analysis Society” talk). Mediolateral visual perturbations during treadmill walking affect gait variability, but this effect had previously been demonstrated only for randomly or discretely changing perturbations. Nine healthy adults walked on a treadmill within a virtual corridor whose width changed sinusoidally between a Narrow and a Wide condition, and step width variability was quantified using the standard deviation and the fractal scaling exponent. Step width variability increased and its temporal structure became less persistent in the Wide condition, suggesting that the gradual transition from a wide to a narrow visual field may reweight visual information as a function of corridor width.

May 20, 2021 5:15 PM — 6:00 PM

Human Movement Variability Conference (HMVC) 2021