Effects of Proprioceptive and Visual Disturbance on Inphase and Anti-phase Hand Performance

Purpose: The present study aimed to investigate the effect of sensory and movement speed manipulations on bimanual coordination dynamics. Here we compared to what extent the absence and or bias of different sensory modalities affect performance of coordination of movements. Methods: Fifteen physical education students of Shahid Beheshti University (aged 18-25 years) were participated in the study. Participants performed bimanual in-phase and anti-phase movements with their wrists at 3 levels of speed ranging from slow to fast and 4 different sensory conditions, including 1) Normal sensory input; 2) Masked vision; 3) Masked proprioception; and 4) Full sensory deprivation. Separate analyses of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures on speed and sensory conditions were conducted for the in-phase and anti-phase movement patterns, followed by post hoc analyses using the Bonferroni correction. The dependent variable was error of relative phase. Results: In line with observations from previous studies, results of our study showed that increasing movement speed influenced performance of the anti-phase (P=0.001) but not the in-phase (P=0.9) coordination patterns. Specifically, as speed increased from slow to fast, the performance of 1800 anti-phase patterns destabilized, with participants showing higher error scores of relative phase. Sensory manipulation showed that proprioception and vision did influence the accuracy and consistency of the coordination tasks in both the in-phase and antiphase movement patterns (P=0.001). Conclusion: The performance of a bimanual linear coordination task depends mainly on the availability of proprioceptive input.