Abstract
The contribution of cervical proprioception, vision, and vestibular feedback to the dynamic head–trunk orientation error in the yaw direction was investigated to further the understanding over the mechanism of coordination among different sensory modalities for dynamic head–trunk orientation. To test the contribution of each sensory modality, individually and together, to dynamic head–trunk orientation, 10 healthy human subjects participated in the extended cervical joint position error test, measuring the ability of repositioning the head back to the reference orientation after 45° yaw rotation of head or trunk. The error between initial and returned angles was measured. The test was repeated under eight different conditions of sensory feedback, with or without each of three sensory modalities. Each subject completed 64 trials (8 per condition) in a random order for fair comparison. No change was found in bias when one of the three modalities was missing, while variance was largest at the lack of dynamic cervical proprioception. When two of the three modalities were missing (i.e., one of the three modalities was present), both bias and variance were minimum at the presence of cervical proprioception. Additionally, both visual and vestibular feedback was redundant (i.e., no further improvement in both bias and variance), if the other one (visual or vestibular feedback) was present with dynamic cervical proprioception. In sum, the experimental results suggest that dynamic cervical proprioception is the most significant sensory modality for reducing the dynamic head–trunk orientation error in the yaw direction.
Highlights
Our self-awareness of relative orientation between the head and the trunk in both static and dynamic situations is heavily dependent on sensors within joints and muscles in the cervical spine region
This study aims to garner a better understanding of the contribution of each of these the three sensory modalities contributions to the perception of dynamic head–trunk orientation
The p-value for the interaction between vestibular feedback and dynamic cervical proprioception was 0.002 (η2 = 0.017), which indicates that vestibular feedback and dynamic cervical proprioception have statistically meaningful interaction on decreasing bias
Summary
Our self-awareness of relative orientation between the head and the trunk in both static and dynamic situations is heavily dependent on sensors within joints and muscles in the cervical spine region. While the head directly uses visual and vestibular information to perceive its orientation, the trunk does not inherently have a sensory system detecting its absolute orientation independently. The cervical muscles and tendons cross two or more joints and have multiple attachments to different bones. This redundantly interwound structure helps to deliver feedback of the head–trunk orientation accurately by the integration of information from body sensors such as muscle spindles and the Golgi tendon organ (Richmond and Abrahams, 1979; Kamibayashi and Richmond, 1998). Visual feedback provides information about the trunk orientation relative to the head (i.e., head–trunk orientation), but it is typically limited, as our gaze is typically centered toward our direction of motion rather than our bodies. The conversion and matching processes between information derived from vision and proprioception adds an error, which is often called as a visual-proprioceptive matching error (Smeets et al, 2006)
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