Neural correlates of proprioceptive upper limb position matching

Abstract

Proprioceptive information allows humans to perform smooth coordinated movements by constantly updating one's mind with knowledge of the position of one's limbs in space. How this information is combined with other sensory modalities and centrally processed to form conscious perceptions of limb position remains relatively unknown. What has proven even more elusive is pinpointing the contribution of proprioception in cortical activity related to motion. This study addresses these gaps by examining electrocortical dynamics while participants performed an upper limb position matching task in two conditions, namely with proprioceptive feedback or with both visual and proprioceptive feedback. Specifically, we evaluated the reduction of the electroencephalographic power (desynchronization) in the μ frequency band (8–12 Hz), which is known to characterize the neural activation associated with motor control and behavior. We observed a stronger desynchronization in the left motor and somatosensory areas, contralateral to the moving limb while, parietal and occipital regions, identifying association and visual areas, respectively, exhibited a similar activation level in the two hemispheres. Pertaining to the influence of the two experimental conditions it affected only movement's offset, and precisely we found that when matching movements are performed relying only on proprioceptive information, a lower cortical activity is entailed. This effect was strongest in the visual and association areas, while there was a minor effect in the hand motor and somatosensory areas.

Multisensory Integration in Stroke Patients: A Theoretical Approach to Reinterpret Upper-Limb Proprioceptive Deficits and Visual Compensation

“…To be able to perform the normalization, among the numerous studies that can be found in the literature, only those reporting a quantitative comparison between at least two of the four categories of tasks (W-A, sB-A, aB-A, and C-M) could be included in the dataset. Performance data of healthy subjects were retrieved from Van Beers et al (1996) , Ernst and Banks (2002) , Butler et al (2004) , Monaco et al (2010) , Tagliabue and McIntyre (2011) , Torre et al (2013) , Khanafer and Cressman (2014) , Cameron and López-Moliner (2015) , Arnoux et al (2017) , Herter et al (2019) , and Marini et al (2019) and those of stroke patients from Scalha et al (2011) , Torre et al (2013) , Dos Santos et al (2015) , Contu et al (2017) , Gurari et al (2017) , Rinderknecht et al (2018) , Herter et al (2019) , and Ingemanson et al (2019) . Details about the dataset, the fitting algorithm and the quantification of the obtained results are given in Supplementary Section 5 .…”

“…“Pure” proprioceptive processing, assessed with a W-A P tasks seemed to entail primarily the activation of M1 and S1 ( Butler et al, 2004 ; Marini et al, 2019 ). W-A P ( Figure 4A ) tasks, the simplest tasks in terms of computational load (see section “Application of the Optimal Sensory Integration Theory to Proprioception Assessment Tests”), are presumably based on simpler networks.…”

“…Posterior parietal cortex (PPC), including the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), the superior parietal lobule (SPL), and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Areas in blue: cortical areas preferentially involved in W-A P , purely proprioceptive tasks ( Butler et al, 2004 ; Iandolo et al, 2018 ; Marini et al, 2019 ). Green: enhanced activity when the task requires cross-reference processing in symmetric between-arms tasks (sB-A P ) as in Ben-Shabat et al (2015) and Iandolo et al (2018) ; red: in the symmetric between-arms tasks (sB-A VP ) as in Semrau et al (2018) ; purple: in the asymmetric between-arms task (aB-A P ) as in Pellijeff et al (2006) ; yellow: in cross-modal (C-M P ) tasks as in Grefkes et al (2002) , Butler et al (2004) , and Van de Winckel et al (2012) .…”

Online proprioception feeds plasticity of arm representation following tool-use in healthy aging

“…While the neural correlates of this update remain to be elucidated, the sensorimotor regions, as well as more posterior parietal cortices, could be likely candidates. Previous neuroimaging work indeed pointed to the intraparietal sulcus and the premotor cortex as neural correlate of the body estimate, and have more recently underlined the role of the somatosensory cortices in the coding of proprioception 44 , 45 and position sense 46 , 47 .…”

Effects of a Robot-aided Somatosensory Training on Proprioception and Motor Function in Stroke Survivors

“…Within the framework of a somatosensory-based motor training, somatosensory signals are employed to provide movement feedback for online motor control either in the absence of vision or to augment existing visual feedback. Using augmented somatosensory feedback during voluntary movement will activate a well-known network of somatosensory cortical and motor cortical areas (10,11). One speci c type of somatosensory feedback is vibro-tactile feedback (VTF) applied super cially to the skin.…”