Definition
Proprioception is the awareness of the position and movements of one’s body.
Introduction
Proprioception refers to the sense of one’s body, in particular, the position of body parts relative to each other, as well as their movements through space. Proprioception plays an important role in the planning and execution of actions. Indeed, during goal-directed motor behavior, the estimation of the limb’s position derived from the signals in motor cortex is compared with proprioceptive information about the limb’s actual position (Sober and Sabes 2003). Any discrepancy between the two signals can be used to adjust the motor command to correct the course of the limb trajectory. The importance of proprioception in movement is especially apparent in patients with impaired proprioception; these patients tend to display highly uncoordinated movements despite having an intact motor system. The movements of these patients are slow, jerky, and usually inaccurate (Sacks 1985). If the...
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References
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Further Reading
Hassan Z, Stuart DG (1988) Animal solutions to problems of movement control: the role of proprioceptors. Annu Rev Neurosci 11(1):199–223
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Tabot, G. (2013). Proprioception. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_381-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_381-1
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