Postural Responses to Changing Task Conditions

The experimental goal was to investigate discrepancies in the literature concerning postural adaptation and to determine if the prior presentation of horizontal perturbations affected the amplitude of responses to rotational perturbations. Surface EMG recordings from lower leg muscles (gastrocnemius (GAS) and tibialis anterior (TA)) were recorded in twelve subjects, and the amplitudes of the responses were statistically analyzed. We did not find differences between the responses to rotational perturbations which preceded or followed horizontal perturbations. This finding did not support the hypothesis that differences in the order of presentation of the different types of perturbations accounted for the discrepancies in the literature. Furthermore, our design did not show the progressive elimination of the GAS response within three to five sequential trials. Instead, we found a slow but significant response amplitude reduction over ten trials without yielding a permanent disappearance of the response. When analyzing the GAS responses to the rotational perturbations only, we found two components that contributed to the response reduction: 1) an initial reduction between trials one and subsequent trials, which could be due to habituation of a startle-like response; and 2) a second reduction which was more gradual. Our results also showed an immediate change in the response amplitude on the first trial, when the type of perturbation was changed. This is inconsistent with the view that ankle musculature stretch and joint movement are the primary inputs driving the postural responses. Since small ankle dorsiflexing rotations produced by the platform translations caused large GAS responses while large ankle dorsiflexing rotations produced by direct platform rotations caused small GAS responses, this suggests that multiple sensory inputs contribute to the responses. We propose that an initial compensation to a new perturbation type occurs within the first trial by the integration of these divergent sensory inputs.