Kinesthetic awareness is an individuals' knowledge of their own body position and movements in space. Sensory integration is the process of combining inputs from proprioceptive receptors in muscles, mechanoreceptors in skin, and visual motor/visual spatial systems is critical to motor skill acquisition. We proposed that kinesthetic awareness training (KAT): the addition of haptic feedback in real time, to introduce secondary discriminatory system information into kinesthetic processing. We hypothesized that input will reinforce proprioceptive skills by merging a non-native input with native proprioceptive and visual system information, and subsequently cause an increase in accuracy in a single session of motor skill practice. Shattuck, et. al. 2016

This study aims to explore the effects of augmented sensory feedback on proprioception and to measure the neural changes resulting from the additional sensory processing during motor learning. Data collection began March 8th, 2020.

The dynamical systems perspective (DSP) suggests that human movement contains inherently varying patterns, even when the individual intends to repeat the same movement. Rhythmic movements like walking/running and trained discreet movements like a golf swing or racquet swing have subtle variations in the degrees of movement. The DSP in regard to human performance suggests that those with a wide range of movement variability have increased capacity to adapt during a movement than those who have a smaller range of movement variability. Consistent performance outcomes that repeatedly occur with variable patterns of movement suggest that motor control strategies are in place to adapt to these variations. Therefore, one can surmise that in consistent performance, these adaptations during movement could include temporal, spatial or force distribution changes. To investigate this idea, we examined the pelvis and torso kinematics of the windmill pitch.

A two-part study was conducted to investigate the neural substrates of learning a timed motor sequence task. In part 1, a multi-day experiment was performed to determine 1) whether neural patterns reflecting motor learning were detectable during the execution and visualization of a novel repetitive drawing task, and 2) whether neural patterns were correlated with task performance.