This work was begun as an investigation into the characteristics of passive movement sense at the metatarso-phalangeal joint. Since the original work of Goldscheider (1889), other investigators (Winter, 1912; Laidlaw & Hamilton, 1937 a, b;Cleghorn & Darcus, 1952) have investigated joint sensation in normal subjects by measuring the response to a continuous movement. Their work established the existence of threshold speeds of movement, varyingwith different joints in different subjects, below which sensation of movement in a relaxed limb was either absent, or present irregularly and inconstantly.In the present investigation speeds were used considerably above the threshold values, but not so fast as to introduce complications resulting from variations in reaction times. The toe was displaced at a uniform angular rate and the subject responded as soon as the sensation of displacement was appreciated. The results were expressed in degrees of joint rotation, hereafter called the reaction angle. The experiment was carried out on eighty-four volunteer subjects, all medical students, in an endeavour to establish a normal range for sensation of passive movement.An initial investigation was carried out to test whether the reaction angles did in fact represent a true sensation and were not distributed at random. An analysis of variance carried out on the data left no doubt that the reaction angles represented a real measurement; some variability was shown within the scores for each foot of each subject and between the averages of the two feet of the same subject, but far greater variability was present between average scores for different individuals. Further, this initial investigation revealed no significant differences between reaction angles for the same subject at the three different speeds used (0.2, 1 and 2°/sec), although, at the slowest speed, judgement of the moment at which unequivocal sensation of movement
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