ENTROPY AS A GLOBAL VARIABLE OF THE LEARNING-PROCESS

The work reported here is a contribution to the study of a complex mot or behavior, viewed globally. The question raised is the nature of the process by which an environment-sensorimotricity coupling is organize d. The material is the trajectory of a constrained free climbing task, and the main concept is entropy. The entropy of the climber's traject ory is used to measure the degree of structuring in the successive sta tes of the subject-environment system during the learning of a complex task. It will be shown that the entropy of the trajectory decreases a s learning progresses, and that the shape of the entropy curve is a fu nction of the climber's level of expertise. A model of constraint rela xation is proposed to describe the learning process. Then, based on a theory of probabilistic inference, an attempt is made to show that thi s natural biological process obeys the thermodynamic laws of neural ne tworks.