Effects of gymnastics expertise on the perception of body orientation in the pitch dimension

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate how experts in motor skills requiring a fine postural control perceive their body orientation with few gravity based sensory cues. In Experiment 1, expert gymnasts and controls had to detect their body tilt when pitching at a velocity of 0.05 deg.s(-1), in two conditions of body restriction (strapped and body cast altering the somatosensory cues). Contrary to the experts, the controls exhibited a larger body tilt when totally restrained in the body cast. In Experiment 2, subjects had to estimate their Subjective Postural Vertical (SPV) starting from different angles of pitch tilt. The controls exhibited significant errors of SPV judgement whereas the experts were very precise. These results suggest that 1) somatosensory cues are more informative than otolithic cues for the perception of body orientation, and 2) the efficiency of otolithic and/or interoceptive inputs can be improved through a specific training to compensate for the lack of somatosensory cues.