Nursery World - Sensory Processing, Part 3

Proprioception – our sense of our body in relation to the world – how it develops and what happens when problems arise. By Anne O’Connor and Dr Kath Dickinson

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Proprioception is a long word for something relatively simple, once we know what it is. Like vestibular development, it is fundamental and something we are almost unaware of once it is fully developed and working properly.

The term comes from the Latin ‘proprius’, which means ‘one’s own’. It helps to know this, as it is proprioception that provides us with a sense of our bodily selves – ‘a dynamic sensory-motor map of the body’ (LeVoguer and Pasch 2014), or our very own personal satnav, helping us understand our bodies in relation to our environment (Connell and McCarthy 2014).

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