On-Off Intermittency in a Human Balancing Task

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Motion analysis in three dimensions demonstrate that the fluctuations in the vertical displacement angle of a stick balanced at the fingertip obey a scaling law characteristic of on-off intermittency and that >98% of the corrective movements occur fast compared to the measured time delay. These experimental observations are reproduced by a model for an inverted pendulum with time-delayed feedback in which parametric noise forces a control parameter across a particular stability boundary. Our observations suggest that parametric noise is an essential, but up until now underemphasized, component of the neural control of balance.