Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48108, USA.
Neurosci Lett. 2010 Aug 30;481(1):54-8. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2010.06.053. Epub 2010 Jun 25.
Our sense of proprioception is vital for the successful performance of most activities of daily living, and memory-based joint position matching (JPM) tasks are often utilized to quantify such proprioceptive abilities. In the present study we sought to determine if matching a remembered proprioceptive target angle was influenced significantly by the length of time given to develop a neural representation of that position. Thirteen healthy adult subjects performed active matching of passively determined elbow joint angles (amplitude = 20 degrees or 40 degrees extension) in the absence of vision, with either a relatively "short" (3 s) or "long" (12 s) target presentation time. In the long condition, where subjects had a greater opportunity to develop an internal representation of the target elbow joint angle, matching movements had significantly smaller variable errors and were associated with smoother matching movement trajectories of a shorter overall duration. Taken together, these findings provide an important proprioceptive corollary for previous results obtained in studies of visually-guided reaching suggesting that increased exposure to target sensory stimuli can improve the accuracy of matching performance. Further, these results appear to be of particular importance with respect to the estimation of proprioceptive function in individuals with disability, who typically have increased noise in their proprioceptive systems.
我们的本体感觉对于日常生活中大多数活动的成功执行至关重要，基于记忆的关节位置匹配（JPM）任务通常用于量化这种本体感觉能力。在本研究中，我们试图确定在给定时间内形成对该位置的神经表示的时间长度是否会显著影响对记忆中的本体感觉目标角度的匹配。13 名健康成年受试者在没有视觉的情况下进行主动匹配被动确定的肘关节角度（幅度= 20 度或 40 度伸展），目标呈现时间相对较短（3 秒）或较长（12 秒）。在较长的条件下，受试者有更多的机会形成目标肘关节角度的内部表示，匹配运动的可变误差明显较小，并且与更平滑的匹配运动轨迹相关，总持续时间较短。总之，这些发现为先前在视觉引导的伸展研究中获得的结果提供了一个重要的本体感觉推论，表明增加对目标感觉刺激的暴露可以提高匹配性能的准确性。此外，这些结果对于残疾个体的本体感觉功能估计尤其重要，因为他们的本体感觉系统通常存在更大的噪声。
