BJMB
Brazilian Journal of Motor Behavior
Special issue:
“In memory of Michael Turvey”
!
Scott Kelso
2023
VOL.17
N.6
285 of 287
One more time with feeling: A personal tribute to Michael Turvey the scientist
1
J.A. SCOTT KELSO
1,2
1
Center for Complex Systems & Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA.
2
Intelligent Systems Research Centre, Ulster University, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland.
Correspondence to:!J.A. Scott Kelso
email: jkelso@fau.edu
https://doi.org/10.20338/bjmb.v17i6.409
ABBREVIATIONS
HKB model Haken-Kelso-Bunz model
PUBLICATION DATA
Received 16 11 2023
Accepted 10 12 2023
Published 22 12 2023
ABSTRACT
Early influences of Michael Turvey’s work on the author’s thinking and Turvey’s long lasting impact on the
field of motor behavior and related scientific disciplines are briefly described.
KEYWORDS: Perception | Action | Functional Synergies | Coordination Dynamics
INTRODUCTION
1
When Claudia texted me that Michael was gone, I immediately said I’d come up. Knowing that others would have the same
reaction to the terrible news, she said “Michael will be sorry to miss the gathering”. Isn’t that the truth! Looking around at this room and
seeing you all, I think you will agree, he’s here. Can’t you hear him? As he used to say in his famous lectures when he wanted to
emphasize a point “One more time with feeling!” Everyone here who knows Michael Turvey will agree he’d want us to celebrate his life.
One more time with feeling. And this time, Mikey, yours truly gets to call the shots. But I know he’s listening. I can hear him, his deeply
resonant Shakespearean voice: “I’m listening Kelso”. He could be so intimidating sometimes, couldn’t he? Why? Because, in fact, as
everyone knows he was a genius.
I can’t remember when I first met Michael Turvey. Maybe as early as 1973 at one of the NASPSPA meetings, for sure by 1977
at Ithaca College. But before that, there was this paper he wrote which was different than any paper I had ever read before. He’d written it
during a Guggenheim Fellowship at the University of Sussex in England, circa 1973 or 74. It was called “Preliminaries to a Theory of
Action with Reference to Vision” (Turvey, 1977; see also Fowler & Turvey, 1978). Although it wasn’t published until 1977 somehow a
draft was in circulation—just regular photocopier stuff. My students and I struggled over it, partly because of the content—Turvey had
unearthed a whole host of papers few had ever heard of before, and partly because of the sheer elegance and style of the writing. How is
it that you can perceive the letter A in such a staggering variety of contexts? And how is it that you can produce the letter A using an
infinite variety of coordinated movements? How is the constancy of perception linked to the constancy of action? The concepts of action
he introduced, invariants, equivalence classes and the like were revolutionary at the time. So were the concepts of vision, of how we see.
The minimal unit of understanding lay in their relation. A coalition. A togetherness. Not a dominance of the senses over the poor old
motor system, the servant of the mind. Rather, Turvey was saying the action concept of writing A and the perception concept for
identifying A share common ground. This was not armchair stuff. All of it was substantiated by mechanistic details of modeling,
mathematics and neurophysiology. I had never read anything like it. And the obvious level of scholarship from the Jesuitly trained Turvey
was unparalleled.
Why did this early Turvey paper have such an effect? Well, it was far closer to what I thought the whole field of movement
should be all about! It struck a chord. From an early age, I was interested in sports and singing and drama, as well as science. When I
entered graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin I wondered if there might be a scientific entry point into how you become skilled at those
things. The zeitgeist of cognitive psychology in those days was all about “programs”, “representations” and “information processing.” In
order to claim any legitimacy for the study of movement, the task was to see whether movement “cues” (feelings of where your limbs are
and how they move) follow the same rules as other sensory systems. Does memory for movement deteriorate over time the same way as
memory for visual and auditory information? What was measured were very simple responses—positioning a lever or tapping a key.
!
1
Based on a eulogy delivered at Michael Turvey’s funeral on August 19, 2023.
BJMB! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
Brazilian(Journal(of(Motor(Behavior(
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Scott Kelso
2023
VOL.17
N.6
286 of 287
Special issue:
“In memory of Michael Turvey”
Had this anything to do with understanding real skill in real environments? As they say sometimes about the field of Quantum Mechanics,
the attitude was don’t worry about what it means. Just get on and do it. Which, of course, we did (Kelso, 1977).
However, Turvey’s paper and his ideas of coordinative structures aka functional synergies changed the furniture in the room, as
they say. For me, it was a completely new way to do science. I asked him to come out to the University of Iowa and give a series of
lectures, which were recorded and transcribed and later published as three chapters with his students, Hollis Fitch and Betty Tuller—with
beautiful graphics by someone called Claudia Carello (Turvey, Fitch & Tuller, 1982; Tuller, Turvey & Fitch, 1982; Fitch, Tuller & Turvey,
1982; see also Turvey & Carello, 1995). So, the plot as you can see, is thickening…
The Turvey lectures were in the spring of 1978 but did not appear in book form until 1982. By the Fall of 1978, I had moved to
Haskins Labs at Yale University and was working directly with Michael and Carol Fowler and Betty Tuller and many other wonderful
scientists and brilliant students. Practically speaking, by the way, Michael didn’t have anything to do with my going to Haskins (my
students and I at Iowa had a paper on voluntary two-handed movements about to appear in Science (Kelso, Southard & Goodman, 1979)
and tenured Associate Professorships were on offer at Oregon and USC) but in my mind as well as my heart, of course he did. Big time.
Haskins offered the opportunity to do full-time research, which I loved. There we went after Michael’s coordinative structures in studies of
both speech and limb movements. For the latter, I brought my own apparatus for studying bimanual coordination and perturbations
thereof (Kelso & Holt, 1980). For speech, the technical expertise at Haskins was unsurpassed. Anywhere in the world. So we pursued, as
Michael would say “how the bits and pieces gang together” when a person speaks or moves their body. That simple phrase of
Michael’s—how you can take a lot of things and have them gang together to form an organization—a process now understood as self-
organization--turned out to have even greater ramifications. Unforeseen at the time. That’s another story (Kelso, 1995; 2022; Turvey,
1990). But none of it—finding coordinative structures in speech production, discoveries of phase transitions in human hand movements
(and indeed eventually in the human brain), the HKB model and all its symmetry breaking extensions that spawned the field of
Coordination Dynamics—from Matter to Movement to Mind, Social interactions and Beyond…Entire fields and scientific approaches, call
them what you may--Task Dynamics, Gestural Dynamics, Articulatory Phonetics, Behavioral Dynamics, Ecological Dynamics, DST, The
Dynamical Hypothesis in Cognitive Science, 4E Cognition, Dynamic Touch, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera as the King of Siam used to
say…None of it would have happened without Michael Turvey’s insights, understandings and writings. None of it. Simple as that. That’s
really all I came here to say. Except, as an Irishman, for a parting glass. In his Essay or Epistle on Man, Alexander Pope said of Newton:
“Could he, whose rules the rapid comet bind, Describe or fix one movement of his mind?” The great scientist, Michael Turvey took us
much closer to answering Pope’s question.
REFERENCES
1. Fitch, H. L., Tuller, B., & Turvey, M.T. (1982). The Bernstein Perspective: III. Tuning of coordinative structures with special reference to perception.
In Kelso, J.A.S. (Ed.), Human Motor Behavior: An Introduction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
2. Fowler, C.A. & Turvey, M.T. (1978). Skill acquisition: An event approach with reference to searching for the optimum of a function of many variables.
In G.E. Stelmach (Ed.), Information processing in motor control and learning. New York: Academic Press.
3. Kelso, J.A.S. (1977). Motor control mechanisms underlying human movement reproduction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception
and Performance, 3, 529-543.
4. Kelso, J.A.S. (1995). Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
5. Kelso, J.A.S. (2022). On the Coordination Dynamics of (Animate) Moving Bodies. Journal of Physics (Complexity Section). doi: 10.1088/2632-
072X/ac7caf
6. Kelso, J.A.S. & Holt, K.G. (1980). Exploring a vibratory systems analysis of human movement production. Journal of Neurophysiology, 43,
1183-1196.
7. Kelso, J.A.S., Southard, D., & Goodman, D. (1979). On the nature of human interlimb coordination. Science, 203, 1029-1031.
8. Tuller, B., Turvey, M.T., & Fitch, H.L. (1982). The Bernstein Perspective: II. The concept of muscle linkage or coordinative structure. In Kelso, J.A.S.
(Ed.), Human Motor Behavior: An Introduction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
9. Turvey, M.T. (1977). Preliminaries to a theory of action with reference to vision, In R.E. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, acting and knowing:
Toward an ecological psychology. Hillsdale, NJ.: Erlbaum.
10. Turvey, M.T. (1990). Coordination. American Psychologist, 45(8), 938-953.
11. Turvey, M.T. & Carello, C. (1995). Dynamic touch. In Perception of Space and Motion (Eds. W. Epstein & S. Rogers), New York, Academic Press,
pp.401-490.
12. Turvey, M.T., Fitch, H. L., & Tuller, B. (1982). The Bernstein Perspective: I. The problems of degrees of freedom and context-conditioned variability.
In Kelso, J.A.S. (Ed.), Human Motor Behavior: An Introduction. Hillsdale, NJ.: Erlbaum.
BJMB! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
Brazilian(Journal(of(Motor(Behavior(
(
Scott Kelso
2023
VOL.17
N.6
287 of 287
Special issue:
“In memory of Michael Turvey”
Citation: Kelso JAS. (2023).!One more time with feeling: A personal tribute to Michael Turvey the scientist. Brazilian Journal of Motor Behavior, 17(6):285-287.
Editor-in-chief: Dr Fabio Augusto Barbieri - São Paulo State University (UNESP), Bauru, SP, Brazil. !
Associate editors: Dr José Angelo Barela - São Paulo State University (UNESP), Rio Claro, SP, Brazil; Dr Natalia Madalena Rinaldi - Federal University of Espírito Santo
(UFES), Vitória, ES, Brazil; Dr Renato de Moraes – University of São Paulo (USP), Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil.
Guest editor: Dr Vitor Leandro da Silva Profeta - University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil.!
Copyright:© 2023 Scott Kelso and BJMB. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives
4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: Nothing to report.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
DOI:!https://doi.org/10.20338/bjmb.v17i6.409