A debate exists in the literature as to what extent perception is conscious. In some publications regarding proprioception,
the term proprioception has explicitly only been seen as properly used when subjects were able to report the imposed movement's
direction. Detections of movements without movement-direction perception, have been seen as nonspecific. Since a lot of studies
discussed this point but never tested it explicitly, we tested it by using nonspecific hunting paradigms (only the occurrence
of a movement has to be detected, not its direction) with the following rationale. If the perception performance is really
nonspecific, no difference regarding the movement's direction should be found. Thus, if we found a different detection performance
regarding flexion and extension by means of a nonspecific paradigm, it would demonstrate that this "nonspecific" perception
is already specific. Therefore, we measured the perception characteristics separately for flexion and extension. The perception
characteristics have been determined from the amplitude-velocity-relation curve. Two different, nonspecific hunting paradigms,
modifications of our previously published specific hunting paradigm, have been used. Thus, we determined pairs of threshold
values, regarding amplitude hunting using three different angular velocities (0.1° s
–1, 0.25° s
–1, and 0.5° s
–1) and regarding velocity hunting using three different angular displacements (0.25°, 0.5°, and 1°) as well, for flexion and
extension, respectively. We found that both threshold paradigms (velocity hunting and amplitude hunting) revealed the same
perception characteristics for a given movement direction. With an increasing angular velocity, angular displacement threshold
values converged toward a common value for flexion and extension (about 0.2°); with an increasing angular displacement, angular
velocity threshold values converged toward separate values for flexion (about 0.06° s
–1) and extension (about 0.1° s
–1). Thus, our findings demonstrate that detection performance is specific and not bound to conscious perception, since specific
thresholds for flexion and extension were revealed with nonspecific hunting paradigms.
Movement detection Proprioception Sensory threshold Consciousness Human knee joint
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