Ludovic Marin

**education and qualifications** **1995-1997** **Ph.D. Thesis.** University of the Mediterranean, Marseille, France **2009** **Habilitation**. University Montpellier I, Montpellier, France. **General research Interests** My main research interests lie in the perception and action field, investigating how controlled movements may be coupled with sensory information. I am particularly interested in skilled behavior in infants, adults and elders, whether this be in more traditional motor control tasks or in sport settings. In addition, I have been involved with investigating different aspects of the dynamical/ecological approach to perception and action and to emotion and action. This includes how infants, adults and elders coordinate together (called *interpersonal coordination*) and control their posture, orientation and goal-directed movements as well as how visual, proprioceptive and vestibular information are used to control movement and how information and movement are coupled. **Current research** As associate professor in the “EuroMov Digital Health in Motion” laboratory at the University of Montpellier (France), my research is focused on inter-personal coordination in interlimb and postural situations. The goal of my research is to determine the sources of interpersonal coordination. Although different fields have investigated social interaction, little work has been performed to integrate their approaches in an interdisciplinary study. Consequently, our work aims at using an interdisciplinary paradigm to examine the multilevel processes that characterize motor coordination and its consequences on social interactions. In order to conduct our investigations, we collaborate with researchers from different fields (psychiatry and robotic) to examine motor coordination in healthy individuals and its impairments in agents with social disorders: patients (social phobia, autistic and schizophrenic patients) and robots (considered as having a deficit in human-robot coordination). In addition to this major research topic, we also investigate the role of the multimodality in motor social interaction. More specifically, we seek to determine the weight of each sensory modality (vision, audition, touch) and their interactions in interpersonal coordination situations. To carry out our experiments we use the original method of wavelet transform (and cross-wavelet transform) in order to measure the temporal evolution of frequency, amplitude and phase of non-stationary movements. This work is the first stage in a series of studies investigating the emotion-action coupling and the “perception-action” relationship. **Previous research** **Post doctoral fellow and lab supervisor,** from 1998 to 2001 in the “Infant Motor Development” Laboratory, Department of psychology, New York University, New York: I was interested in understanding how locomotion, postural control and motor perception was set up in infant toddlers (from 8 to 24 months old). In particular, I was focused on how these infants were able to perceive a risky environment (gaps in the floor, steep slopes, changes in surface friction and rigidity) while walking or crawling and if so, how they adapted their locomotion to cope with these various environmental constraints. **Scientific researcher** (temporary contract) from 1997 to 1998 in the “Sport and Motor Performance” Laboratory at the University of Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France: My work was focused on spatial orientation and postural control. Studies concerning spatial orientation were conducted at the CRSSA (Army Research Center) where we investigated the role of the different sensory information (vestibular and somato sensory systems) used to control spatial orientation. The postural control studies were based on how Down’s syndrome teenagers were able to control their balance and what sensory information they mainly used to control their posture. **Ph. D. student** (competitive grant) from 1994 to 1997 in the “Movement and Perception” laboratory at the University of the Mediterranean, Marseille, France: My thesis research explored how humans coordinate their limb movements in order to produce relevant postures during a voluntary head movement task. I used concepts of the dynamical approach to explore this coordination, assuming that the large number of available degrees of freedom could be reduced to a few macroscopic descriptors able to summarize the coordination between components. I found that the phase relation between movements of the hip and ankle could be used to describe the dynamical coordination patterns of postural sway. Two stable patterns of coordination were found to emerge from the hip-ankle relations: an in-phase pattern (hip and ankle moving in the same direction) and an anti-phase pattern (these joints moving in the opposite direction). These results confirmed the relevance of using relative phase to study postural control in bipedal stance in humans.