More terminology chez nous
S. and I are happy to have identified a phenomenon we call "overly fine-grained following". To illustrate: the cat does this a great deal, when he is trotting along close at your heels. You go walking off towards the kitchen, say, and realize you wanted to grab a coffee cup on your way in. As you backtrack a single step, he whips around in order to follow you in this new direction, only, of course, to have to do it all over again when you return to your original path, when if he'd been a mere half-second slower to respond, he would have been just as well off.
Although first observed in this particular cat-human configuration, I think you will find that this terminology is more widely applicable than you might expect, and that the concept is a useful thing to have a name for. Try it and see.
