Wundt's Views on Sensations of Innervation: A Reevaluation

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Abstract
It is sometimes stated that Wundt believed in the primacy of ‘sensations of innervation’ in the control of eye and limb position, to the exclusion of afferent feedback. Wundt's own statements on the subject are traced through the six editions of the Grundzüge: he believed that sensations of innervation were a contributory factor along with peripheral feedback; but in the fourth edition he dropped the term and subsumed them under ‘central sensations of senses’, because increased neurophysiological knowledge made a literal interpretation of the original term impossible. In the fifth edition he developed a more precise model of central processes, described as ‘sensory costimulation’, and an additional idea of ‘reproduced’ or conditioned sensations. He mentions clinical evidence on the perception of eye and limb position and of weight by paralysed and other subjects. This evidence is discussed in relation to modern theories. It is concluded that Wundt's later theories have some similarities with modern ‘hybrid’ theories of efference-contingent afference.