Presenter(s): Kieley Trempy
Faculty Mentor(s): Kate Spitzley & Andy Karduna
Poster 30
Session: Sciences
Movement is the product of sensory input, mainly from vision and proprioception, and motor output. Vision is the sense of the surrounding space and proprioception is the sense of the body’s position in space. Joint position sense (JPS) is commonly used as a measure of proprioception. JPS of the dominant and nondominant shoulder was measured in healthy subjects to quantify error in a JPS task with and without visual information. Previous studies have examined sensory differences in limb dominance with conflicting results. Some have shown that no differences exist, while others show that movements with the dominant arm rely more on visual information and movements with the nondominant arm rely more on proprioceptive information. The latter theory is illustrated in activities of daily living, such as with preparing food, where the dominant arm uses a knife by viewing the movement while the nondominant arm guides the food by feeling the movement. It was hypothesized that in a JPS task, the dominant arm would have less error with visual information whereas the nondominant arm would have less error without visual information. Subjects wore a virtual reality headset with a tracker on their arm while performing a JPS task. Using the headset, subjects were presented with either a visual representation of their arm location or no visual information about arm location. No difference was found between sides. However, difference was seen between the vision and no vision conditions regardless of limb dominance. Higher error with no vision indicates that proprioception alone is not as effective in driving accurate movements as the combination of vision and proprioception. Future studies analyzing the contributions of vision and proprioception to movement may rule out variation associated with limb dominance.