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Quarterly Journal of Experimental... Dec 2020The Joint Position Reproduction test (JPR), one of the most widely used measurements to estimate proprioceptive accuracy, requires the short term storage of...
The Joint Position Reproduction test (JPR), one of the most widely used measurements to estimate proprioceptive accuracy, requires the short term storage of proprioceptive information. It has been suggested that visuospatial sketchpad plays a fundamental role in the memorization of proprioceptive information. The current study aimed to investigate this assumption. To do so, we developed and used a novel JPR protocol to measure the retention capacity with respect to sequences of different positions. Our goal was to develop the original task further to make it comparable with other widely used short-term memory measurements, in which the memory capacity was determined by the number of the items participants retain (memory span). We compared participants' (N=39) performance in this task to that of results of Corsi block-tapping task (capacity of the visuospatial sketchpad) and Digit span task (capacity of the phonological loop). Proprioceptive memory capacity did not correlate either with spatial or verbal memory capacity. The exploratory analysis revealed that proprioceptive span correlated positively with the performance if 5 joint positions had to be retained. Further associations with verbal span for 6 or 7 positions, and spatial span for 5 positions were found. Our findings do not support the idea that visuospatial sketchpad plays a fundamental role in the storage of proprioceptive information. The independence of span measures indicates that proprioceptive information might be stored in a subsystem independent of the visuospatial sketchpad or phonological loop.
Topics: Humans; Memory, Short-Term; Motivation; Neuropsychological Tests; Proprioception
PubMed: 32972307
DOI: 10.1177/1747021820957147 -
Nature Communications Apr 2023Conscious perception of limb movements depends on proprioceptive neural responses in the somatosensory cortex. In contrast to tactile sensations, proprioceptive cortical...
Conscious perception of limb movements depends on proprioceptive neural responses in the somatosensory cortex. In contrast to tactile sensations, proprioceptive cortical coding is barely studied in the mammalian brain and practically non-existent in rodent research. To understand the cortical representation of this important sensory modality we developed a passive forelimb displacement paradigm in behaving mice and also trained them to perceptually discriminate where their limb is moved in space. We delineated the rodent proprioceptive cortex with wide-field calcium imaging and optogenetic silencing experiments during behavior. Our results reveal that proprioception is represented in both sensory and motor cortical areas. In addition, behavioral measurements and responses of layer 2/3 neurons imaged with two-photon microscopy reveal that passive limb movements are both perceived and encoded in the mouse cortex as a spatial direction vector that interfaces the limb with the body's peripersonal space.
Topics: Mice; Animals; Somatosensory Cortex; Proprioception; Upper Extremity; Forelimb; Touch; Mammals
PubMed: 37045825
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37575-w -
Journal of Neurophysiology Nov 2020Falls are an increasing cause of mortality in an ever-growing aging population. The main factors to consider in reducing mortality rates due to falls are postural... (Review)
Review
Falls are an increasing cause of mortality in an ever-growing aging population. The main factors to consider in reducing mortality rates due to falls are postural control, consisting of the vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive system, and perturbation response. This Neuro Forum article reviews recent literature highlighting the developmental changes that occur in aging populations and the possible avenues for interventions and training to mitigate fall risk.
Topics: Accidental Falls; Aging; Humans; Postural Balance; Proprioception; Vestibule, Labyrinth
PubMed: 32816613
DOI: 10.1152/jn.00767.2019 -
Journal of Musculoskeletal & Neuronal... 2005The cyclic nature of walking can lead to repetitive stress and associated complications due to the rate of loading (ROL) experienced by the body at the initial contact... (Clinical Trial)
Clinical Trial
The cyclic nature of walking can lead to repetitive stress and associated complications due to the rate of loading (ROL) experienced by the body at the initial contact of the foot with the ground. An individual's gait kinematics at initial contact has been suggested to give rise to the ROL, and a repetitive, high ROL may lead to several disorders, including osteoarthritis. Additionally, proprioception, the feedback signaling of limb position and movement, may play a role in how the foot strikes the ground and thus, the ROL. Our goal was to explore the relationship between proprioception, gait kinematics and ROL. Thirty-eight women were recruited for gait analysis, and the gait characteristics 50 ms prior to and at initial contact were examined. Two proprioception tests, joint angle reproduction and threshold to detect passive motion were used to examine the subject's proprioceptive acuity. Our results indicate that individuals with a larger knee angle (i.e., greater extension) 50 ms prior to initial contact (IC) experience a higher ROL during gait and have poorer proprioceptive scores. However, it remains unclear whether poor proprioception causes a high ROL or if a high ROL damages the mechanoreceptors involved in proprioception, but the apparent relationship is significant and warrants further investigation.
Topics: Adolescent; Adult; Biomechanical Phenomena; Female; Gait; Humans; Knee; Mechanoreceptors; Proprioception; Walking
PubMed: 16340143
DOI: No ID Found -
ELife May 2023Biological motor control is versatile, efficient, and depends on proprioceptive feedback. Muscles are flexible and undergo continuous changes, requiring distributed...
Biological motor control is versatile, efficient, and depends on proprioceptive feedback. Muscles are flexible and undergo continuous changes, requiring distributed adaptive control mechanisms that continuously account for the body's state. The canonical role of proprioception is representing the body state. We hypothesize that the proprioceptive system could also be critical for high-level tasks such as action recognition. To test this theory, we pursued a task-driven modeling approach, which allowed us to isolate the study of proprioception. We generated a large synthetic dataset of human arm trajectories tracing characters of the Latin alphabet in 3D space, together with muscle activities obtained from a musculoskeletal model and model-based muscle spindle activity. Next, we compared two classes of tasks: trajectory decoding and action recognition, which allowed us to train hierarchical models to decode either the position and velocity of the end-effector of one's posture or the character (action) identity from the spindle firing patterns. We found that artificial neural networks could robustly solve both tasks, and the networks' units show tuning properties similar to neurons in the primate somatosensory cortex and the brainstem. Remarkably, we found uniformly distributed directional selective units only with the action-recognition-trained models and not the trajectory-decoding-trained models. This suggests that proprioceptive encoding is additionally associated with higher-level functions such as action recognition and therefore provides new, experimentally testable hypotheses of how proprioception aids in adaptive motor control.
Topics: Animals; Humans; Proprioception; Posture; Neural Networks, Computer; Muscle Spindles; Neurons
PubMed: 37254843
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.81499 -
ELife Oct 2022Natural perception relies inherently on inferring causal structure in the environment. However, the neural mechanisms and functional circuits essential for representing...
Natural perception relies inherently on inferring causal structure in the environment. However, the neural mechanisms and functional circuits essential for representing and updating the hidden causal structure and corresponding sensory representations during multisensory processing are unknown. To address this, monkeys were trained to infer the probability of a potential common source from visual and proprioceptive signals based on their spatial disparity in a virtual reality system. The proprioceptive drift reported by monkeys demonstrated that they combined previous experience and current multisensory signals to estimate the hidden common source and subsequently updated the causal structure and sensory representation. Single-unit recordings in premotor and parietal cortices revealed that neural activity in the premotor cortex represents the core computation of causal inference, characterizing the estimation and update of the likelihood of integrating multiple sensory inputs at a trial-by-trial level. In response to signals from the premotor cortex, neural activity in the parietal cortex also represents the causal structure and further dynamically updates the sensory representation to maintain consistency with the causal inference structure. Thus, our results indicate how the premotor cortex integrates previous experience and sensory inputs to infer hidden variables and selectively updates sensory representations in the parietal cortex to support behavior. This dynamic loop of frontal-parietal interactions in the causal inference framework may provide the neural mechanism to answer long-standing questions regarding how neural circuits represent hidden structures for body awareness and agency.
Topics: Animals; Macaca; Visual Perception; Parietal Lobe; Motor Cortex; Proprioception
PubMed: 36279158
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.76145 -
Scientific Reports Jun 2022The Chinese government has recently issued the strictest ever guideline to improve the compulsory education system. The new policy aims at reducing the burden of...
The Chinese government has recently issued the strictest ever guideline to improve the compulsory education system. The new policy aims at reducing the burden of excessive homework and supplementary tutoring, whilst promoting extracurricular activities, including sports and arts, for primary and junior middle school students. To examine the impact that this reform might have on sensory development-which is critical for higher-order cognitive functions-we assessed proprioceptive abilities in children from 5 to 8 years of age. Proprioception refers to sensations of position and motion of the body in space and is mediated by activity in somatosensory and prefrontal cortical areas. By asking participants to perform position matching tasks in the forward-backward directions, we were able to compare the proprioceptive maps of children with and without regular sports training. We demonstrate that extracurricular sports activities can modify the proprioceptive map and improve proprioceptive acuity and stability in school-aged children.
Topics: Child; Child, Preschool; Humans; Proprioception; Sports
PubMed: 35665769
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-13565-8 -
Scientific Reports Jul 2021Circle-line drawing paradigm is used to study bimanual coupling. In the standard paradigm, subjects are asked to draw circles with one hand and lines with the other...
Circle-line drawing paradigm is used to study bimanual coupling. In the standard paradigm, subjects are asked to draw circles with one hand and lines with the other hand; the influence of the concomitant tasks results in two "elliptical" figures. Here we tested whether proprioceptive information evoked by muscle vibration inducing a proprioceptive illusion (PI) of movement at central level, was able to affect the contralateral hand drawing circles or lines. A multisite 80 Hz-muscle vibration paradigm was used to induce the illusion of circle- and line-drawing on the right hand of 15 healthy participants. During muscle vibration, subjects had to draw a congruent or an incongruent figure with the left hand. The ovalization induced by PI was compared with Real and Motor Imagery conditions, which already have proved to induce bimanual coupling. We showed that the ovalization of a perceived circle over a line drawing during PI was comparable to that observed in Real and Motor Imagery condition. This finding indicates that PI can induce bimanual coupling, and proprioceptive information can influence the motor programs of the contralateral hand.
Topics: Analysis of Variance; Brain; Cognition; Female; Humans; Male; Motor Activity; Proprioception; Psychomotor Performance
PubMed: 34294818
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-94569-8 -
Current Biology : CB Mar 2019Proprioceptive neurons provide feedback about body positions and movements that are critical for coordination. Two new studies have revealed sequential,...
Proprioceptive neurons provide feedback about body positions and movements that are critical for coordination. Two new studies have revealed sequential, direction-dependent changes in dendritic folding and activities of proprioceptive neurons in freely-moving Drosophila larvae.
Topics: Animals; Drosophila; Feedback; Movement; Proprioception; Sensory Receptor Cells
PubMed: 30889389
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.02.004 -
BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders Jul 2023Afferent input from the sole affects postural stability. Cutaneous reflexes from the foot are important to posture and gait. Lower-limb afferents alone provide enough...
BACKGROUND & PURPOSE
Afferent input from the sole affects postural stability. Cutaneous reflexes from the foot are important to posture and gait. Lower-limb afferents alone provide enough information to maintain upright stance and are critical in perceiving postural sway. Altered feedback from propreoceptive receptors alters gait and patterns of muscle activation. The position and posture of the foot and ankle may also play an important role in proprioceptive input.Therefore, the current research aims to compare static balance and ankle and knee proprioception in people with and without flexible flatfeet.
METHODOLOGY
91 female students between the ages of 18 and 25 voluntarily participated in this study, of which 24 were in the flexible flatfoot group and 67 were in the regular foot group after evaluating the longitudinal arch of the foot. The position sense of ankle and knee joints were measured using the active reconstruction test of the ankle and knee angle; Static balance was measured using the Sharpened Romberg test. Data were non-normally distributed. Accordingly, non-parametric tests were applied. The Kruskal-Wallis test was applied to compare differences between groups in variables.
RESULT
Kruskal-Wallis test showed a significant difference between two groups of flat feet and normal feet in the variables of static balance and position sense of ankle plantarflexion, ankle dorsiflexion, and knee flexion (p ≤ 0.05). A significant correlation was found between static balance and sense of ankle and knee position in the group with normal feet. The analysis of the regression line also showed that ankle and knee position sense could predict the static balance score in the regular foot group (ankle dorsiflexion position sense 17% (R = 0.17), ankle plantarflexion position sense 17% (R = 0.17) and knee flexion position sense 46% (R = 0.46) explain of changes in static balance).
DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION
Flexible flatfoot soles can cause loss of balance and sense of joint position; therefore, according to this preliminary study, clinicians must be aware and should take into account this possible deficit in the management of these patients.
Topics: Humans; Female; Adolescent; Young Adult; Adult; Ankle; Cross-Sectional Studies; Flatfoot; Ankle Joint; Knee Joint; Proprioception; Posture; Postural Balance
PubMed: 37403076
DOI: 10.1186/s12891-023-06678-2