Direct fit of a theoretical model of phase transition in oscillatory finger motions

This paper presents a general method to fit the Schöner‐Haken‐Kelso (SHK) model of human movement phase transitions directly to time series data. A robust variant of the extended Kalman filter technique is applied to the data of a single subject. The options of covariance resetting and iteration within recursion were used to obtain time‐dependent estimates of both the α and β parameters in the SHK model. Comparison between transition onset time and the time at which |β(t|T)/α(t|T)| becomes critical indicates that the transitions are advanced by noise. The method can be extended to handle non‐normal data and generalization across subjects and/or experimental conditions.