The role of vision in joint position sense tasks

Movement planning and execution are heavily influenced by visual and proprioceptive sensory information. The present study tests the effect of visual manipulations in a 3D virtual reality environment on movement outcomes in a joint position sense task. It was observed that removing visual information about limb location did not affect movement outcomes, but imperceptibly offsetting limb location increased movement error. Subjects prioritized the visual sensory target over the proprioceptive even when it was inaccurate, indicating that this sensory information is weighted more heavily in this paradigm.