01:377:310 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Peripheral Neuropathy, Binocular Vision, Peripheral Vision
25 Nov 2019
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Techniques to investigate the role of proprioception in motor control
• Surgical deafferentation
• Afferent neural pathways associated with movements of interest have been
surgically removed or altered
• Deafferentation due to sensory neuropathy
• Sometimes called peripheral neuropathy
• Large myelinated fibers of the limb are lost, leading to a loss of all sensory
information except pain and temperature
• Tendon vibration technique
• Involves high speed vibration of the tendon of the agonist muscle
• Proprioceptive feedback is distorted rather than removed
Role of Proprioceptive feedback in motor control
• Research using deferation and tendon vibration techniques has shown that
proprioception influences:
• Movement accuracy
• Target accuracy
• Spatial and temporal accuracy for movement in progress
• Timing of onset motor commands
• Coordination of body and/or limb segments
• Postural control
• Spatial-temporal coupling between limbs and limb segments
Vision and motor control
• Vision is our preferred source of sensory information
• Evidence from everyday experiences
• Beginning typists look at their fingers
The moving room experiment
• Lee and Aronson
• Participants stood in a room in which the walls moved toward or away from them
but the floor did not move
• Situation created conflict between which two sensory systems?
• Vision and proprioception
• Results: when the walls moved, people adjusted their posture to not fall, even though
they weren't moving off balance
Techniques for investigating the role of vision
• Eye movement recordings
• Tracks foveal vision’s “point of gase”
• What the person is looking at
• Temporal occlusion techniques
• Stop video or film at various times
• Spectacles with liquid crystal lenses
• Event occlusion technique
• Mask view on video or film of specific events or characteristics
Role of vision in motor control
• Evidence comes from research investigating specific issues and vision characteristics
• 1) Monocular vs. Binocular vision
