Proprioceptive accuracy in immersive virtual reality: A developmental perspective

Abstract

Proprioceptive development relies on a variety of sensory inputs, among which vision is hugely dominant. Focusing on the developmental trajectory underpinning the integration of vision and proprioception, the present research explores how this integration is involved in interactions with Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) by examining how proprioceptive accuracy is affected by age, perception, and environment.Individuals from 4 to 43 years old completed a self-turning task which asked them to manually return to a previous location with different sensory modalities available in both IVR and reality. Results were interpreted from an exploratory perspective using Bayesian model comparison analysis, which allows the phenomena to be described using probabilistic statements rather than simplified reject/not-reject decisions. The most plausible model showed that 4-8-year-old children can generally be expected to make more proprioceptive errors than older children and adults. Across age groups, proprioceptive accuracy is higher when vision is available, and is disrupted in the visual environment provided by the IVR headset. We can conclude that proprioceptive accuracy mostly develops during the first eight years of life and that it relies largely on vision. Moreover, our findings indicate that this proprioceptive accuracy can be disrupted by the use of an IVR headset.From the intrauterine life, our physical, psychological, and social development 2 progresses thanks to the interaction between our genetic profile and the environment. 3 Sensory information from the both external world (exteroception) and the self 4 (interoception) is detected by our emerging sensory functions. We talk about 5 exteroception when the sensory information comes from the environment around us (e.g. 6 sight, hearing, touch), while interoception is the perception of our body and includes 7 "temperature, pain, itch, tickle, sensual touch, muscular and visceral sensations, 8 vasomotor flush, hunger, thirst" (p. 655 [1]). This information, which comes from 9 different complementary sensory modalities, has to be integrated so that we can interact 10 with and learn from the environment. The multisensory integration that follows takes 11 August 16, 2019 2/38 time to develop and emerges in a heterochronous pattern: we rely on the various 12 sensory modalities to different degrees at different points in the human developmental 13 trajectory, during which the sensory modalities interact in different ways [2]. In general, 14 our sensory development is driven by crossmodal calibration: one accurate sensory 15 modality can improve performance based on information delivered by another, less 16 accurate, sensory modality [3-5]. 17 Proprioception: an emergent perception arising from a 18 multisensory process 19 Both exteroception and interoception drive our discovery of the external world and the 20 self. One important physical dimension of the concept of self is proprioception, whose 21 definition is particularly complex and debated in the extant literature. Propr...

Perception and Motion in Real and Virtual Environments: A Narrative Review of Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…From this perspective, we could speculate that an enlarged inter-stimuli delay might reduce the "multisensory crowding" associated with enlarged TBWs, resulting in sensory and learning facilitation. Although this has yet to be investigated, our studies suggest that IVR and HMDs disrupt proprioception in neurotypical groups (Valori et al, 2020b) and can either improve or worsen sensorimotor performance in individuals with ASD depending on the way they utilize visual and proprioceptive information, which differs across individuals (Valori et al, 2020a).…”

“…Participants joined four weekly 30-min desensitization sessions, whereby each stimulus could be delivered a maximum of 20 times and was gradually moved closer to the participant, thus reducing their perceived anxiety and increasing the interaction time towards the target stimuli (Johnston et al, 2020). Despite these preliminary works offering encouraging suggestions, further investigation is needed to elucidate the sensorimotor potential of IVR training, which would be particularly compelling for ASD, and their acceptability to users (Valori et al, 2020a).…”

“…Children with ASD appeared to feel comfortable with the same interpersonal distance between them and either a real or virtual character in an HMD-delivered IVR designed to be a faithful reproduction of the real one (Simões et al, 2020). In a recent pilot experiment, we studied how children and adults with ASD move and perceive their own movements with different sensory information available in IVR versus real environments (Valori et al, 2020a). Seven participants with ASD were rotated to a certain degree while sitting on a swivel chair, and then asked to actively rotate back to the starting position, thus encoding and reproducing the exact self-motion.…”

Multimodality in VR: A Survey

“…Proprioception arises from static (position) and dynamic (motion) information [22]. It plays a key role in the concept of self, and has been more traditionally defined as "awareness of the spatial and mechanical status of the musculoskeletal framework" [224]. Proprioceptive information comes mainly from mechanosensory neurons next to muscles, tendons and joints, although other senses can induce proprioceptive sensations as well.…”

Multimodality in VR: A survey

“…Proprioception arises from static (position) and dynamic (motion) information [21]. It plays a key role in the concept of self, and has been more traditionally defined as "awareness of the spatial and mechanical status of the musculoskeletal framework" [197]. Proprioceptive information comes mainly from mechanosensory neurons next to muscles, tendons and joints, although other senses can induce proprioceptive sensations as well.…”