Format

Send to

Choose Destination
See comment in PubMed Commons below
J Neurophysiol. 2012 Dec;108(12):3313-21. doi: 10.1152/jn.00122.2012. Epub 2012 Sep 12.

Can proprioceptive training improve motor learning?

Author information

1
Department of Psychology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.

Abstract

Recent work has investigated the link between motor learning and sensory function in arm movement control. A number of findings are consistent with the idea that motor learning is associated with systematic changes to proprioception (Haith A, Jackson C, Mial R, Vijayakumar S. Adv Neural Inf Process Syst 21: 593-600, 2008; Ostry DJ, Darainy M, Mattar AA, Wong J, Gribble PL. J Neurosci 30: 5384-5393, 2010; Vahdat S, Darainy M, Milner TE, Ostry DJ. J Neurosci 31: 16907-16915, 2011). Here, we tested whether motor learning could be improved by providing subjects with proprioceptive training on a desired hand trajectory. Subjects were instructed to reproduce both the time-varying position and velocity of novel, complex hand trajectories. Subjects underwent 3 days of training with 90 movement trials per day. Active movement trials were interleaved with demonstration trials. For control subjects, these interleaved demonstration trials consisted of visual demonstration alone. A second group of subjects received visual and proprioceptive demonstration simultaneously; this group was presented with the same visual stimulus, but, in addition, their limb was moved through the target trajectory by a robot using servo control. Subjects who experienced the additional proprioceptive demonstration of the desired trajectory showed greater improvements during training movements than control subjects who only received visual information. This benefit of adding proprioceptive training was seen in both movement speed and position error. Interestingly, additional control subjects who received proprioceptive guidance while actively moving their arm during demonstration trials did not show the same improvement in positional accuracy. These findings support the idea that the addition of proprioceptive training can augment motor learning, and that this benefit is greatest when the subject passively experiences the goal movement.

PMID:
22972960
PMCID:
PMC3544879
DOI:
10.1152/jn.00122.2012
[Indexed for MEDLINE]
Free PMC Article
PubMed Commons home

PubMed Commons

0 comments
How to join PubMed Commons

    Supplemental Content

    Full text links

    Icon for HighWire Icon for PubMed Central
    Loading ...
    Support Center