Elbow position sense in man: Contrasting results in matching and pointing

Abstract In this study an attempt is made to differentiate between two procedures which have been indiscriminately used in many previous studies to assess position sense in man: the matching procedure, in which subjects are required to place one arm in a position identical to that maintained by the contralateral target arm, and the pointing procedure, in which a given point on the target arm has to be touched with the index finger of the contralateral hand. For this purpose, eight subjects were tested in both tasks, before and after exposure of the target arm to 11 D° wedge prisms, on the assumption that matching and pointing performances would not be affected in the same way. The results show that this experimental manipulation affects only the pointing performances, indicating that matching and pointing tests involve separate central mechanisms for processing identical peripheral messages. It is suggested that, depending on the spatial requirements of the task, at least two types of coding of a given position might coexist at the central level.

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