Sensorimotor Control and Motor Timing: Balance Threats, Coordination Dynamics, and Rhythmic Patterns

Human movement depends on the continuous exchange between sensory input and motor output. Sensorimotor control enables the nervous system to integrate proprioceptive, visual, vestibular, and auditory information to generate and adjust movement, while motor timing governs how actions are organized in time and how temporal patterns adapt to changing demands. Although each area has received considerable attention in isolation, the connections between balance control under threat, coordination dynamics, and rhythmic motor behavior remain underexplored as an integrated field. Balance is now understood as a context-dependent process shaped by biomechanical, psychological, and cognitive factors. When individuals face real or perceived threats to stability, postural strategies shift in ways that reveal how the nervous system reweights sensory channels, reallocates attention, and modifies the prioritization among competing motor control goals. Understanding these adaptations carries direct implications for fall prevention, rehabilitation, and active living across the lifespan.Coordination dynamics provides a complementary theoretical framework grounded in dynamical systems theory for understanding how complex movement patterns emerge, stabilize, and transition under constraints. Concepts such as relative phase, pattern stability, and phase transitions have advanced our knowledge of interlimb coupling, interpersonal synchronization, and the flexible reorganization of movement in response to task and environmental change. Importantly, this perspective also offers tools to examine how the interplay of motor control priorities, for instance, the concurrent demands of maintaining balance and executing a skilled action, shapes coordinative behavior.Rhythmic motor patterns form a third pillar. Research on spontaneous motor tempo, sensorimotor synchronization, and the temporal microstructure of movement has demonstrated that rhythm perception and production are deeply embedded in sensorimotor circuits, with growing applications in cueing-based interventions for gait rehabilitation, exercise adherence, and motor learning. The research topic «Sensorimotor Control and Motor Timing: Balance Threats, Coordination Dynamics, and Rhythmic Patterns’ brings together researchers from motor control, biomechanics, neuroscience, psychology, and rehabilitation science. We welcome original research articles, reviews, brief research reports, and perspectives addressing, but not limited to, the following themes: • Sensorimotor integration, proprioception, and postural control under conditions of real or perceived threat,• Sensory reweighting and the interplay of motor control priorities during balance and voluntary movement,• Coordination dynamics in movement tasks, including interlimb, interpersonal, and performer-environment coupling,• Rhythmic motor timing, sensorimotor synchronization, and tempo adaptation in movement contexts,• Neural and physiological correlates of balance, coordination, and timing across healthy, clinical, and aging populations,• Nonlinear and complexity-based analyses of postural sway, movement variability, and temporal structure,• The role of auditory, visual, and haptic cueing in motor learning, rehabilitation, and training,• Developmental, aging, and expertise-related changes in sensorimotor timing and coordination,• Methodological advances in the measurement and analysis of motor timing, coordination dynamics, and balance control. Topic editors: Elissavet Rousanoglou, Antonis Ekizos Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78367/sensorimotor-control-and-motor-timing-balance-threats-coordination-dynamics-and-rhythmic-patterns