Abstract：
Tendon vibration is used extensively to assess the role of peripheral mechanoreceptors in motor control, specifically, the muscle spindles. Periodic tendon vibration is known to activate muscle spindles and induce a kinesthetic illusion that the vibrated muscle is longer than it actually is. Noisy tendon vibration has been used to assess the frequency characteristics of proprioceptive reflex pathways during standing; however, it is unknown if it induces the same kinesthetic illusions as periodic vibration. The purpose of the current study was to assess the effects of both periodic and noisy tendon vibration in a kinesthetic targeting task. Participants (N = 15) made wrist extension movements to a series of visual targets without vision of the limb, while their wrist flexors were either vibrated with periodic vibration (20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 Hz), or with noisy vibration which consisted of filtered white noise with power between ~ 20 and 100 Hz. Overall, our results indicate that both periodic and noisy vibration can induce robust targeting errors during a wrist targeting task. Specifically, the vibration resulted in an undershooting error when moving to the target. The findings from this study have important implications for the use of noisy tendon vibration to assess proprioceptive reflex pathways and should be considered when designing future studies using noisy vibration.
摘要：
肌腱振动被广泛用于评估外周机械感受器在运动控制中的作用，具体来说,肌肉纺锤。众所周知，周期性的肌腱振动会激活肌肉纺锤，并引起动觉错觉，即振动的肌肉比实际时间长。有噪声的肌腱振动已用于评估站立过程中本体感受反射通路的频率特性；然而，尚不清楚它是否会引起与周期性振动相同的动觉错觉。当前研究的目的是评估动觉靶向任务中周期性和嘈杂的肌腱振动的影响。参与者（N=15）在没有肢体视觉的情况下对一系列视觉目标进行手腕伸展运动，虽然他们的手腕屈肌要么以周期性振动（20、40、60、80和100Hz）振动，或具有噪声振动，该噪声振动由功率在〜20至100Hz之间的滤波白噪声组成。总的来说,我们的结果表明，周期性和嘈杂的振动都会在手腕瞄准任务中引起稳健的瞄准错误。具体来说,当移动到目标时，振动会导致下冲错误。这项研究的结果对使用嘈杂的肌腱振动评估本体感受反射途径具有重要意义，在设计使用嘈杂振动的未来研究时应予以考虑。
