Abstract
Successful motor control requires accurate estimation of our body in space for planning, executing, and evaluating the outcome of our actions. It has been shown that the estimation of limb position is susceptible to motor adaptation. However, a similar effect has not been found in locomotion, possibly due to how it was tested. We hypothesized that split-belt walking with the legs moving at different speeds changes the estimation of the legs’ position when taking a step. Thus, we assessed young subjects’ perception of step length (i.e., inter-feet distance at foot landing) when they moved their legs (active perception) or when the legs were moved by the experimenter (passive perception). We found that the active perception of step length was substantially altered following split-belt walking, whereas passive perception exhibited minor changes. This suggests that split-belt walking induced the adaptation of efferent signals, without altering sensory signals. We also found that active perceptual shifts were sensitive to how they were tested: they were most salient in the trailing leg and at short step lengths. Our results suggest that split-belt walking could modulate the deficient perception of step length post-stroke, which may contribute to gait asymmetries impairing patients’ mobility.
Highlights
Successful motor control requires accurate estimation of our body in space for planning, executing, and evaluating the outcome of our actions
In this study we first asked does sensory information encoding limb position recalibrate after locomotor adaptation induced by split-belt walking? To address this question, we used a passive perceptual task, as in previous work (e.g.4–6,9,13–16), to quantify changes in the perceived position of the legs after they were passively moved to distinct step lengths
We investigated the effects of locomotor adaptation on passive and active step length perception
Summary
Successful motor control requires accurate estimation of our body in space for planning, executing, and evaluating the outcome of our actions. We further hypothesized that walking condition, such as walking speed and/or step size, would regulate the shifts in active perception of limb positions since walking speed alters motor after-effects[26] and walking speed alters step size (e.g.27,28) To test these hypotheses, we separately investigated shifts in passive and active perception of step length following sensorimotor adaptation in walking. The active perception task was performed under distinct walking speeds and step sizes to test our hypothesis that active perceptual effects depend on the condition in which they are tested We assessed both passive and active perception since it is possible that sensorimotor adaptation only induces changes in the integration of afferent and efferent information, but not in afferent information alone
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