Proprioception in Action: A Matter of Ecological and Social Interaction

The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical and formal framework to understand how the proprioceptive and kinesthetic system learns about body position and possibilities for movement in ongoing action and interaction. Whereas most weak embodiment accounts of proprioception focus on positionalist descriptions or on its role as a source of parameters for internal motor control, we argue that these aspects are insufficient to understand how proprioception is integrated into an active organized system in continuous and dynamic interaction with the environment. Our strong embodiment thesis is that one of the main theoretical principles to understand proprioception, as a perceptual experience within concrete situations, is the coupling with kinesthesia and its relational constitution—self, ecological, and social. In our view, these aspects are underdeveloped in current accounts, and an enactive sensorimotor theory enriched with phenomenological descriptions may provide an alternative path toward explaining this skilled experience. Following O'Regan and Noë (2001) sensorimotor contingencies conceptualization, we introduce three distinct notions of proprioceptive kinesthetic-sensorimotor contingencies (PK-SMCs), which we describe conceptually and formally considering three varieties of perceptual experience in action: PK-SMCs-self, PK-SMCs-self-environment, and PK-SMC-self-other. As a proof of concept of our proposal, we developed a minimal PK model to discuss these elements in detail and show their explanatory value as important guides to understand the proprioceptive/kinesthetic system. Finally, we also highlight that there is an opportunity to develop enactive sensorimotor theory in new directions, creating a bridge between the varieties of experiences of oneself and learning skills.

Retention of Movement Cues by Visually Impaired Persons

Describes the results of an experiment which examined whether kinesthetic movement information in a short memory paradigm of visually impaired persons was superior to that of sighted individuals. It was expected that visually impaired subjects would have developed a more sophisticated and refined kinesthetic modality and thus would produce less absolute and variable error than that of the sighted subjects on a movement retention task. It was found that the visually impaired and sighted subjects were equally effective in using the kinesthetic system to retain distance and location cues but the visually impaired subjects were significantly more variable in movement reproduction than were sighted subjects.

Channel Capacity for Kinesthetic Torque Information

A previous study (Russell & Marteniuk, 1974) used informational analysis of absolute judgments to investigate the capacity of the kinesthetic system to transmit information derived from torque cues. As perfect transmission was not obtained in that study, no firm statement regarding channel capacity could be made. Four experiments were conducted in which five subjects made judgments concerning the intensity of 2, 4, 6, and 8 categories, respectively, in an attempt to determine the channel capacity for torque. Information transfer for the four experiments was 1.00, 1.45, 1.60, and 1.67 bits, respectively. It is argued that the latter figure probably reflects the true capacity of the kinesthetic system rather than the 2.09 bits previously reported.