Abstract
The purpose of the study was to assess the influence of real-time auditory feedback on knee proprioception. Thirty healthy participants were randomly allocated to control (n = 15), and experimental group I (15). The participants performed an active knee-repositioning task using their dominant leg, with/without additional real-time auditory feedback where the frequency was mapped in a convergent manner to two different target angles (40 and 75°). Statistical analysis revealed significant enhancement in knee re-positioning accuracy for the constant and absolute error with real-time auditory feedback, within and across the groups. Besides this convergent condition, we established a second divergent condition. Here, a step-wise transposition of frequency was performed to explore whether a systematic tuning between auditory-proprioceptive repositioning exists. No significant effects were identified in this divergent auditory feedback condition. An additional experimental group II (n = 20) was further included. Here, we investigated the influence of a larger magnitude and directional change of step-wise transposition of the frequency. In a first step, results confirm the findings of experiment I. Moreover, significant effects on knee auditory-proprioception repositioning were evident when divergent auditory feedback was applied. During the step-wise transposition participants showed systematic modulation of knee movements in the opposite direction of transposition. We confirm that knee re-positioning accuracy can be enhanced with concurrent application of real-time auditory feedback and that knee re-positioning can modulated in a goal-directed manner with step-wise transposition of frequency. Clinical implications are discussed with respect to joint position sense in rehabilitation settings.
Highlights
Real-time kinematic auditory feedback can be effective in enhancing motor perception, control, and learning (Effenberg, 2005, 2014; Sigrist et al, 2015; Effenberg et al, 2016; Dyer J. et al, 2017)
Strong auditory motor couplings have been confirmed in neuroimaging studies, where enhanced activation in cortical and sub-cortical structures associated with biological motion perception were reported (Scheef et al, 2009; Schmitz et al, 2013)
The experimental group I, with real-time auditory feedback performed significantly better than the control group without auditory feedback as confirmed by the significant main effect of group [F(1, 28) = 6.92, p = 0.014, ηp2 = 0.20]
Summary
Real-time kinematic auditory feedback can be effective in enhancing motor perception, control, and learning (Effenberg, 2005, 2014; Sigrist et al, 2015; Effenberg et al, 2016; Dyer J. et al, 2017). Literature indicates strong associations between auditory and motor areas for enhancing the performance in music (Lahav et al, 2013), breathing (Murgia et al, 2016), writing (Effenberg et al, 2015; Danna and Velay, 2017), sports (Sigrist et al, 2013, 2015; Effenberg et al, 2016), and rehabilitation (Altenmüller et al, 2009; Murgia et al, 2015; Pau et al, 2016; Scholz et al, 2016; Ghai et al, 2017c; Mezzarobba et al, 2017). F. et al, 2017) as well as an error feedback (Altenmüller et al, 2009; van Beers, 2009; Sigrist et al, 2015; van Vugt and Tillmann, 2015), and can enhance motor imagery (Sigrist et al, 2013), cognitive-emotional functioning (Eschrich et al, 2008; Sihvonen et al, 2017; see Sigrist et al, 2013)
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