Body Schema Disturbance in Adolescence: From Proprioceptive Integration to the Perception of Human Movement

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabien Cignetti ◽  
Sébastien Caudron ◽  
Marianne Vaugoyeau ◽  
Christine Assaiante

There is evidence that adolescence is a critical period in development, most likely involving important modifications of the body schema and of the sensorimotor representations. The present study addressed this issue, by investigating the differences between adolescents and adults regarding the integration of proprioceptive information at both perceptual and postural levels and the visual recognition of human movement. Proprioceptive integration was examined using muscle-tendon vibration that evoked either a postural response or an illusory sensation of movement. The ability to recognize human movement was investigated from a paradigm where the participants had to discern between human movements performed with and without gravity. The study produced three main findings. First, the adolescents had larger postural responses to tendon vibrations than the adults, with visual information enabling them to reduce this exaggerated postural reaction. Second, the adolescents had a greater illusory perception of movement compared with the adults. Third, the adolescents had the same perceptual ability as adults in the human movement perception task. In conclusion, we were able to highlight notable differences between adolescents and young adults, which confirms the late maturation of multisensory integration for postural control and the privileged visual contribution to postural control.

Perception ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 127-127
Author(s):  
M Desmurget ◽  
Y Rossetti ◽  
C Prablanc

The problem whether movement accuracy is better in the full open-loop condition (FOL, hand never visible) than in the static closed-loop condition (SCL, hand only visible prior to movement onset) remains widely debated. To investigate this controversial question, we studied conditions for which visual information available to the subject prior to movement onset was strictly controlled. The results of our investigation showed that the accuracy improvement observed when human subjects were allowed to see their hand, in the peripheral visual field, prior to movement: (1) concerned only the variable errors; (2) did not depend on the simultaneous vision of the hand and target (hand and target viewed simultaneously vs sequentially); (3) remained significant when pointing to proprioceptive targets; and (4) was not suppressed when the visual information was temporally (visual presentation for less than 300 ms) or spatially (vision of only the index fingertip) restricted. In addition, dissociating vision and proprioception with wedge prisms showed that a weighed hand position was used to program hand trajectory. When considered together, these results suggest that: (i) knowledge of the initial upper limb configuration or position is necessary to plan accurately goal-directed movements; (ii) static proprioceptive receptors are partially ineffective in providing an accurate estimate of the limb posture, and/or hand location relative to the body, and (iii) visual and proprioceptive information is not used in an exclusive way, but combined to furnish an accurate representation of the state of the effector prior to movement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Ratcliffe ◽  
Katie Greenfield ◽  
Danielle Ropar ◽  
Ellen M. Howard ◽  
Roger Newport

Forming an accurate representation of the body relies on the integration of information from multiple sensory inputs. Both vision and proprioception are important for body localization. Whilst adults have been shown to integrate these sources in an optimal fashion, few studies have investigated how children integrate visual and proprioceptive information when localizing the body. The current study used a mediated reality device called MIRAGE to explore how the brain weighs visual and proprioceptive information in a hand localization task across early childhood. Sixty-four children aged 4–11 years estimated the position of their index finger after viewing congruent or incongruent visuo-proprioceptive information regarding hand position. A developmental trajectory analysis was carried out to explore the effect of age on condition. An age effect was only found in the incongruent condition which resulted in greater mislocalization of the hand toward the visual representation as age increased. Estimates by younger children were closer to the true location of the hand compared to those by older children indicating less weighting of visual information. Regression analyses showed localizations errors in the incongruent seen condition could not be explained by proprioceptive accuracy or by general attention or social differences. This suggests that the way in which visual and proprioceptive information are integrated optimizes throughout development, with the bias toward visual information increasing with age.


1999 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 1355-1364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. van Beers ◽  
Anne C. Sittig ◽  
Jan J. Denier van der Gon

Integration of proprioceptive and visual position-information: an experimentally supported model. To localize one’s hand, i.e., to find out its position with respect to the body, humans may use proprioceptive information or visual information or both. It is still not known how the CNS combines simultaneous proprioceptive and visual information. In this study, we investigate in what position in a horizontal plane a hand is localized on the basis of simultaneous proprioceptive and visual information and compare this to the positions in which it is localized on the basis of proprioception only and vision only. Seated at a table, subjects matched target positions on the table top with their unseen left hand under the table. The experiment consisted of three series. In each of these series, the target positions were presented in three conditions: by vision only, by proprioception only, or by both vision and proprioception. In one of the three series, the visual information was veridical. In the other two, it was modified by prisms that displaced the visual field to the left and to the right, respectively. The results show that the mean of the positions indicated in the condition with both vision and proprioception generally lies off the straight line through the means of the other two conditions. In most cases the mean lies on the side predicted by a model describing the integration of multisensory information. According to this model, the visual information and the proprioceptive information are weighted with direction-dependent weights, the weights being related to the direction-dependent precision of the information in such a way that the available information is used very efficiently. Because the proposed model also can explain the unexpectedly small sizes of the variable errors in the localization of a seen hand that were reported earlier, there is strong evidence to support this model. The results imply that the CNS has knowledge about the direction-dependent precision of the proprioceptive and visual information.


Author(s):  
Minoru Asada

Proprioception is our ability to sense the position of our own limbs and other body parts in space, and body schema is a body representation that allows both biological and artificial agents to execute their actions based on proprioception. The proprioceptive information used by current artificial agents (robots) is mainly related to posture (and its change) and consists of joint angles (joint velocities) given a linked structure. However, the counterpart in biological agents (humans and other animals) includes more complicated components with associated controversies concerning the relationship between the body schema and the body image. A new trend of constructive approaches has been attacking this topic using computational models and robots. This chapter provides an overview of the biology of proprioception and body representation, summarizes the classical use of body schema in robotics, and describes a series of constructive approaches that address some of the mysteries of body representation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Alexandru Cîtea ◽  
George-Sebastian Iacob

Posture is commonly perceived as the relationship between the segments of the human body upright. Certain parts of the body such as the cephalic extremity, neck, torso, upper and lower limbs are involved in the final posture of the body. Musculoskeletal instabilities and reduced postural control lead to the installation of nonstructural posture deviations in all 3 anatomical planes. When we talk about the sagittal plane, it was concluded that there are 4 main types of posture deviation: hyperlordotic posture, kyphotic posture, rectitude and "sway-back" posture.Pilates method has become in the last decade a much more popular formof exercise used in rehabilitation. The Pilates method is frequently prescribed to people with low back pain due to their orientation on the stabilizing muscles of the pelvis. Pilates exercise is thus theorized to help reactivate the muscles and, by doingso, increases lumbar support, reduces pain, and improves body alignment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry M. Davydov ◽  
Andrey Boev ◽  
Stas Gorbunov

AbstractSituational or persistent body fluid deficit (i.e., de- or hypo-hydration) is considered a significant health risk factor. Bioimpedance analysis (BIA) has been suggested as an alternative to less reliable subjective and biochemical indicators of hydration status. The present study aimed to compare various BIA models in the prediction of direct measures of body compartments associated with hydration/osmolality. Fish (n = 20) was selected as a biological model for physicochemically measuring proximate body compartments associated with hydration such as water, dissolved proteins, and non-osseous minerals as the references or criterion points. Whole-body and segmental/local impedance measures were used to investigate a pool of BIA models, which were compared by Akaike Information Criterion in their ability to accurately predict the body components. Statistical models showed that ‘volumetric-based’ BIA measures obtained in parallel, such as distance2/Rp, could be the best approach in predicting percent of body moisture, proteins, and minerals in the whole-body schema. However, serially-obtained BIA measures, such as the ratio of the reactance to resistance and the resistance adjusted for distance between electrodes, were the best fitting in predicting the compartments in the segmental schema. Validity of these results should be confirmed on humans before implementation in practice.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3720
Author(s):  
Barbara Szymona ◽  
Marcin Maciejewski ◽  
Robert Karpiński ◽  
Kamil Jonak ◽  
Elżbieta Radzikowska-Büchner ◽  
...  

Supporting the development of a child with autism is a multi-profile therapeutic work on disturbed areas, especially understanding and linguistic expression used in social communication and development of social contacts. Previous studies show that it is possible to perform some therapy using a robot. This article is a synthesis review of the literature on research with the use of robots in the therapy of children with the diagnosis of early childhood autism. The review includes scientific journals from 2005–2021. Using descriptors: ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders), Social robots, and Robot-based interventions, an analysis of available research in PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science was done. The results showed that a robot seems to be a great tool that encourages contact and involvement in joint activities. The review of the literature indicates the potential value of the use of robots in the therapy of people with autism as a facilitator in social contacts. Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy (RAAT) can encourage child to talk or do exercises. In the second aspect (prompting during a conversation), a robot encourages eye contact and suggests possible answers, e.g., during free conversation with a peer. In the third aspect (teaching, entertainment), the robot could play with autistic children in games supporting the development of joint attention. These types of games stimulate the development of motor skills and orientation in the body schema. In future work, a validation test would be desirable to check whether children with ASD are able to do the same with a real person by learning distrust and cheating the robot.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Suzman ◽  
Zachary J. Williams ◽  
Jacob I. Feldman ◽  
Michelle Failla ◽  
Carissa J. Cascio ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Individuals on the autism spectrum are reported to display alterations in interoception, the sense of the internal state of the body. The Interoception Sensory Questionnaire (ISQ) is a 20-item self-report measure of interoception specifically intended to measure this construct in autistic people. The psychometrics of the ISQ, however, have not previously been evaluated in a large sample of autistic individuals. Methods Using confirmatory factor analysis, we evaluated the latent structure of the ISQ in a large online sample of adults on the autism spectrum and found that the unidimensional model fit the data poorly. Using misspecification analysis to identify areas of local misfit and item response theory to investigate the appropriateness of the seven-point response scale, we removed redundant items and collapsed the response options to put forth a novel eight-item, five-response choice ISQ. Results The revised, five-response choice ISQ (ISQ-8) showed much improved fit while maintaining high internal reliability. Differential item functioning (DIF) analyses indicated that the items of the ISQ-8 were answered in comparable ways by autistic adolescents and adults and across multiple other sociodemographic groups. Limitations Our results were limited by the fact that we did not collect data for typically developing controls, preventing the analysis of DIF by diagnostic status. Additionally, while this study proposes a new 5-response scale for the ISQ-8, our data were not collected using this method; thus, the psychometric properties for the revised version of this instrument require further investigation. Conclusion The ISQ-8 shows promise as a reliable and valid measure of interoception in adolescents and adults on the autism spectrum, but additional work is needed to examine its psychometrics in this population. A free online score calculator has been created to facilitate the use of ISQ-8 latent trait scores for further studies of autistic adolescents and adults (available at https://asdmeasures.shinyapps.io/ISQ_score/).


Perception ◽  
10.1068/p5853 ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (10) ◽  
pp. 1547-1554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Pavani ◽  
Massimiliano Zampini

When a hand (either real or fake) is stimulated in synchrony with our own hand concealed from view, the felt position of our own hand can be biased toward the location of the seen hand. This intriguing phenomenon relies on the brain's ability to detect statistical correlations in the multisensory inputs (ie visual, tactile, and proprioceptive), but it is also modulated by the pre-existing representation of one's own body. Nonetheless, researchers appear to have accepted the assumption that the size of the seen hand does not matter for this illusion to occur. Here we used a real-time video image of the participant's own hand to elicit the illusion, but we varied the hand size in the video image so that the seen hand was either reduced, veridical, or enlarged in comparison to the participant's own hand. The results showed that visible-hand size modulated the illusion, which was present for veridical and enlarged images of the hand, but absent when the visible hand was reduced. These findings indicate that very specific aspects of our own body image (ie hand size) can constrain the multisensory modulation of the body schema highlighted by the fake-hand illusion paradigm. In addition, they suggest an asymmetric tendency to acknowledge enlarged (but not reduced) images of body parts within our body representation.


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