Proprioceptive identification of joint position versus kinaesthetic movement reproduction

Regarding our voluntary control of movement, if identification of joint position, that is independent of the starting condition, is stronger than kinaesthetic movement reproduction, that implies knowledge of the starting position and movement's length for accuracy, is still a matter of debate in motor control theories and neuroscience. In the present study, we examined the mechanisms that individuals seem to prefer/adopt when they locate spatial positions and code the amplitude of movements. We implemented a joint position matching task on a wrist robotic device: this task consists in replicating (i.e. matching) a reference joint angle in the absence of vision and the proprioceptive acuity is given by the goodness of such matching. Two experiments were carried out by implementing two different versions of the task and performed by two groups of 15 healthy participants. In the first experiment, blindfolded subjects were asked to perform matching movements towards a fixed target position, experienced with passive movements that started from different positions and had different lengths. In the second experiment, blindfolded subjects were requested to accurately match target positions that had a different location in space but were passively shown through movements of the same length. We found a clear evidence for higher performances in terms of accuracy (0.42±0.011/°) and precision (0.43±0.011/°) in the first experiment, therefore in case of matching positions, rather than in the second where accuracy and precision were lower (0.36±0.011/° and 0.35±0.011/° respectively). These results suggested a preference for proprioceptive identification of joint position rather than kinaesthetic movement reproduction.