A reassessment of the role of joint receptors in human position sense

Abstract

In the past, the peripheral sense organs responsible for generating human position sense were thought to be the slowly adapting receptors in joints. More recently, our views have changed and the principal position sensor is now believed to be the muscle spindle. Joint receptors have been relegated to the lesser role of acting as limit detectors when movements approach the anatomical limit of a joint. In a recent experiment concerned with position sense at the elbow joint, measured in a pointing task over a range of forearm angles, we have observed falls in position errors as the forearm was moved closer to the limit of extension. We considered the possibility that as the arm approached full extension, a population of joint receptors became engaged and that they were responsible for the changes in position errors. Muscle vibration selectively engages signals of muscle spindles. Vibration of elbow muscles undergoing stretch has been reported to lead to perception of elbow angles beyond the anatomical limit of the joint. The result suggests that spindles, by themselves, cannot signal the limit of joint movement. We hypothesise that over the portion of the elbow angle range where joint receptors become active, their signals are combined with those of spindles to produce a composite that contains joint limit information. As the arm is extended, the growing influence of the joint receptor signal is evidenced by the fall in position errors.

Keywords: Joint receptor; Muscle spindle; Position sense; Proprioception; Thixotropy.

Fig. 1

One-arm pointing task. Perceived position of a subject’s hidden forearm, indicated with a pointer, moved by the subject with their other arm. Abscissa, angle of the hidden forearm, ordinate, perceived angle indicated with the pointer. 0° is the angle of the fully extended forearm, 90° the angle when the position of the forearm was vertical to the supporting base. At each test angle, before making a measurement, the hidden arm was conditioned with isometric contractions of elbow flexors and extensors. At the test angles, 5°, 25°, 45°, 65° and 85°, presented in random order, are shown mean position errors for three repeated measurements for each subject, pooled for 10 subjects (means ± SD), representing a total of 30 measurements at each test angle. Solid line, line joining data points to indicate trend of the data. Dashed line, line of equality, the location of the hidden arm if its position had been determined accurately by the pointer. All values, except that for 5° lay above the line of equality, representing position errors in the direction of forearm extension. Redrawn from Chen et al. (2021)