The sensory systems of the learning pyramid: why the body's senses come first

The row everything rests on: the sensory systems of the learning pyramid

In the learning pyramid (Taylor and Trott, 1991), the level of the sensory systems brings together seven senses. The three senses of the body, tactile, vestibular and proprioceptive, occupy the bottom row: they inform the brain about the body itself, come online early, touch and the vestibular system first, and serve as support for sight, hearing, smell and taste.

Hello to you, the movement professional,

Stand up for a minute, next to a wall if you like, and stand on one foot. With your eyes open, it holds. Close them. Very quickly, your ankle starts working on its own, in small jerks. You feel the pressure slide under the sole, from the forefoot toward the heel, and your toes grip the floor. Your arms want to spread out, your hip drifts to the side and you catch it without having decided to.

What you just felt goes through the three senses that Williams and Shellenberger's learning pyramid places at the very bottom of its second level. With your eyes closed, they were all you had left: the skin under the foot, the vestibular system in the inner ear, the sensors lodged in your muscles and tendons. The pillar gives the overview of the five levels. Here, we go down into that row, the one we notice least as long as it does its job.

The seven sensory systems of level 2 and their two rows

Kathleen Taylor and Maryann Trott placed seven boxes on two rows. On top, sight, hearing, smell and taste, which pick up what comes from the world. At the bottom, the three senses that tell the body about itself. The layout takes up A. Jean Ayres's sensory integration theory, for whom these body senses provide the base on which the processing of everything else is organized.

Start with the skin under the foot. In 1998, Anne Kavounoudias, Régine Roll and Jean-Pierre Roll vibrated the front or the back of the soles of the feet in ten standing subjects. Each time, the whole body leaned to the side opposite the stimulated area, as if the brain read a rise in pressure at that spot and corrected it. The authors describe the sole of the foot as a "dynamometric map" of balance. Touch and proprioception together form the somatosensory system, and the detail of the proprioceptive sensors deserves an article of its own.

The vestibular apparatus, lodged in the inner ear, measures head rotations and accelerations, and it constantly senses the direction of gravity. We have detailed how the vestibular apparatus detects movement and why gravity serves as the postural reference. Above all, remember that none of the three works alone: the balance you just tested on one foot is born from their crossing.

Order of development of the senses: why touch comes first

Ayres's ordering follows the chronology of development, and touch is the first to switch on. Hogg took stock of this in 1941 in a work on fetal anatomy, relying on the observations of Davenport Hooker. The first clear responses to stimulation appear around eight and a half weeks of pregnancy (age counted from the last menstrual period), when the fetus's lip or cheek is brushed.

In birds and mammals, the senses come online in an order that varies little: tactile, vestibular, chemical (smell and taste), then auditory, all before birth. Vision only really gets to work afterward. The researcher David Lewkowicz recalled this sequence in 2014, drawing on the work of Gilbert Gottlieb. When the newborn opens their eyes, the body's senses have already been running for months.

Maturity follows another calendar. In 2006, Peterson and colleagues measured the balance of 154 children aged 6 to 12 on a platform that removes or distorts, in turn, vision and information from the ground. All groups already used somatosensory information like adults. Before age 11, children made less good use of vision. Only the 12-year-olds used vestibular information like adults. The vestibular apparatus is formed very early, and the child takes about twelve years to use it fully to stay upright.

If you train young people, keep these ages in mind. An eight-year-old who falls apart when the ground moves and their eyes no longer help may simply be within the norm for their age. We find this idea of progressive maturation in the article on sensory immaturity. At equal age, it also happens that a system receives sensations at a volume that doesn't suit it.

Sensory modulation and habituation: reacting too much, too little, or never getting used to it

A nervous system that works well learns to ignore. Habituation, the simplest form of learning we know, refers to the decline of the response to a repeated stimulus without consequence. Richard Thompson and William Spencer described its characteristics in 1966, and a group gathered around Catharine Rankin revised them in 2009. Two of them speak to the field: the response comes back after a pause, and habituation remains specific to the stimulus. The gym's air blower disappears from your awareness after a few minutes, and the unexpected whistle blast still makes you turn your head.

The occupational therapist Winnie Dunn proposed in 1997 a model that became a reference for describing these differences. It crosses two axes: the neurological threshold, that is, the amount of stimulation the system needs in order to react, and the way the person responds, passively or by acting to regulate what they receive.

The model describes tendencies present in everyone, to varying degrees. Transposed to sport, and this is our reading, it sheds light on behaviors we file too quickly under character. The athlete who doesn't feel that their foot is badly placed until you show them on video resembles the first profile, the one who always asks for more contact the second. The one who redoes her strap because a fold bothers her leans toward sensitivity, and the one who always finds a reason to dodge the wrestling drill toward avoidance. When habituation doesn't happen, each contact keeps its original volume, as described in the article on tactile hypersensitivity in adults.

Balance and attention: what the body's senses cost the athlete

Standing upright takes attention. In 2002, Marjorie Woollacott and Anne Shumway-Cook gathered the dual-task studies, in which a mental task is added to a balance task. Their synthesis shows that balance control does consume attention, and that this demand varies with the complexity of the postural task.

The budget is shared. A signal that doesn't habituate, or a balance that demands to be monitored, draws on the reserve the athlete needs to listen to the coach's instruction. In our reading, that is the whole point of placing the body's senses at the bottom of the pyramid: as long as they demand attention, there is less left for the top. You find this mechanism in the entry on attentional resources and in the episode devoted to the cognitive tax of posture.

Think of the athlete to whom you explain a new technique on a slippery floor. They nod, they understood, and they forget half the instruction from the first repetition. We hypothesize that part of their attention stayed under their feet.

Interoception, the sense the 1991 diagram didn't draw

Count the boxes of level 2: seven. Research has since taken a great interest in a sense that Taylor and Trott's pyramid doesn't draw, interoception. It refers to the perception of the internal state of the body: heartbeats, breathing, hunger, thirst, temperature. Bud Craig gave in 2002 a definition that is now the reference: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. The occupational therapist Kelly Mahler popularized the expression "eighth sensory system" in a book published at the end of 2015.

Its absence probably comes down to the date: the modern notion took hold after 1991. If we had to add it, our reading would place it in the bottom row, in contact with level 1, since it informs about the arousal state that Williams and Shellenberger's Alert Program precisely seeks to regulate.

In the athlete, interoception is at work every time they estimate their effort, feel their breath rising or notice thirst before the drop in pace. The idea that it can be trained and weighs on performance circulates widely. The sports data remain to be built, and we keep it as a lead.

The bottom row in the athlete: foot placement, contacts, surfaces and landings

On a field, the body's senses are read first in foot placement. One player puts the foot down flat and relaunches it late, another grips the ground with the forefoot and gets noisy at the end of the session. Our hypothesis: each shows you in their own way how their plantar map and their proprioception work together. Fatigue also changes these foot placements, as detailed in the article on proprioception in muscle fatigue.

Surface changes show the system recalculating. Robert Peterka made the floor and the visual environment of standing subjects oscillate in 2002. The larger the oscillations, the more healthy subjects relied on vestibular information, and those who had lost their vestibular function could not make this transfer. By extrapolation, the footballer who moves from dry artificial turf to a heavy, wet pitch, or the trail runner who leaves the road for a stony path, live this sensory reweighting at their own scale.

The landing of a jump brings the three senses of the body together in the same instant: the sole that touches, the head that decelerates, the muscles that lengthen under load. Contacts, for their part, mainly call on touch. In rugby, judo or basketball, the body must constantly sort the contact that informs from the contact that threatens, and this sorting doesn't happen at the same threshold in everyone. The entry on integration of the three systems shows how these flows combine.

Observing the body's senses from Monday, without stepping out of your role

To begin, comparable situations are enough, where only one thing changes at a time.

The first line takes up the logic of the Romberg test. For fine touch, the entry on the tactile discrimination test gives you a more precise benchmark. This grid is a LabO RNP field reading. It orients your gaze and does not have the value of a validated assessment tool. In Neuro-Postural Reprogramming, we always complete it with a retest after each stimulation, to check that the reading holds.

In a child, if a reaction seems clearly out of proportion, to the point of weighing on their daily life or on school, the assessment goes back to the doctor who follows them, the occupational therapist or the psychomotor therapist. You observe and you orient, then you go back to your work on movement.

What holds, and what remains a reading

Some claims in this article rest on solid data. The order in which the senses appear, from touch toward vision, has long been described in birds and mammals. Habituation is one of the best-documented phenomena in behavioral biology, observed in a very large number of species. Sensory reweighting and the attentional cost of balance have been measured in the lab for more than twenty years.

Others are more fragile. Dunn's model is widely used. When Alexia Metz and colleagues tested it in 2019 in 139 healthy adults, only the threshold axis behaved like a continuum, and the behavioral response axis did not hold. The authors qualify: their sample had few low-threshold or passive-response profiles. Peterson's study, for its part, recalls that the maturation of the body's senses spreads over years and overlaps with that of the levels above. Any staircase reading, where you "validate" one level before moving to the next, is weakened by it.

The transpositions to the athlete, the place we propose for interoception and the observation grid belong to field hypothesis. They are tested session after session, and it is the retest that decides.

To place this row back in the whole of the five levels, return to the pillar on the learning pyramid and its limits.

Before reading the game, your athlete reads the ground, and that reading happens without asking their opinion.

👉 I want to step in at the right place.

Frequently asked questions about the sensory systems of the learning pyramid

What are the sensory systems of the learning pyramid?

Level 2 of Taylor and Trott's pyramid (1991) counts seven systems. The three senses of the body, tactile, vestibular and proprioceptive, form the bottom row. Sight, hearing, smell and taste, turned outward, are placed above. This level rests on the central nervous system and carries sensorimotor development.

Why are the body's senses placed below sight and hearing?

The pyramid takes up A. Jean Ayres's sensory integration theory, for whom the senses that inform about the body itself serve as the base for processing information coming from afar. This ordering also matches development: touch and the vestibular sense come online before hearing, and vision arrives last.

Which sense develops first in the fetus?

Touch. The first clear responses to tactile stimulation appear around eight and a half weeks of pregnancy, when the lip or cheek is brushed (observations reported by Hogg, 1941). In birds and mammals, the most described sequence goes from tactile to vestibular, then to the chemical senses and hearing, with vision coming last.

What is sensory habituation?

It is the progressive decline of the response to a repeated stimulus without consequence, like the noise of an air blower that you stop hearing. It was described by Thompson and Spencer in 1966 and revised by Rankin and colleagues in 2009. When it goes poorly, each stimulation keeps its intensity and mobilizes attention.

What is Winnie Dunn's model?

A model proposed in 1997 that crosses the neurological threshold, high or low, and the way of responding, passive or active. Four profiles come out of it: low registration, sensation seeking, sensory sensitivity and avoidance. It is widely used in occupational therapy, and its behavioral axis remains debated.

Why doesn't interoception appear in the pyramid?

The diagram dates from 1991, and the modern notion of interoception, the perception of the internal state of the body, took hold after Bud Craig's synthesis in 2002. Some occupational therapists now call it the eighth sensory system. Its place in the pyramid remains to be discussed; our proposal situates it near the base.

How do you observe the body's senses in an athlete?

By comparing two situations where only one thing changes: eyes open then closed, barefoot then shod, hard floor then soft, stable floor then unstable. The gap between the two gives you a first idea of the weight of the information you removed or changed. It is a field reading, to be confirmed by a retest.

What should you do if a child seems to react far too strongly, or hardly at all, to sensations?

If these reactions weigh on their daily life or schooling, refer the family to the doctor who follows the child, an occupational therapist or a psychomotor therapist, who will carry out the assessment. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and comes in addition to a care pathway, never in its place.

Sources

Taylor K., Trott M. (1991). Pyramid of Learning, diagram reproduced in Williams M.S., Shellenberger S. (1996). How Does Your Engine Run? A Leader's Guide to the Alert Program for Self-Regulation. Albuquerque: TherapyWorks.

Ayres A.J. (1972). Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.

Hogg I.D. (1941). Sensory nerves and associated structures in the skin of human fetuses of 8 to 14 weeks of menstrual age correlated with functional capability. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 75(3), 371-410.

Lewkowicz D.J. (2014). Early experience and multisensory perceptual narrowing. Developmental Psychobiology, 56(2), 292-315.

Peterson M.L., Christou E., Rosengren K.S. (2006). Children achieve adult-like sensory integration during stance at 12-years-old. Gait and Posture, 23(4), 455-463.

Kavounoudias A., Roll R., Roll J.-P. (1998). The plantar sole is a "dynamometric map" for human balance control. NeuroReport, 9(14), 3247-3252.

Peterka R.J. (2002). Sensorimotor integration in human postural control. Journal of Neurophysiology, 88(3), 1097-1118.

Thompson R.F., Spencer W.A. (1966). Habituation: a model phenomenon for the study of neuronal substrates of behavior. Psychological Review, 73(1), 16-43.

Rankin C.H. et al. (2009). Habituation revisited: an updated and revised description of the behavioral characteristics of habituation. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 92(2), 135-138.

Dunn W. (1997). The impact of sensory processing abilities on the daily lives of young children and their families: a conceptual model. Infants and Young Children, 9(4), 23-35.

Metz A.E. et al. (2019). Dunn's model of sensory processing: an investigation of the axes of the four-quadrant model in healthy adults. Brain Sciences, 9(2), 35.

Woollacott M., Shumway-Cook A. (2002). Attention and the control of posture and gait: a review of an emerging area of research. Gait and Posture, 16(1), 1-14.

Craig A.D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655-666.

Mahler K.J. (2015). Interoception: The Eighth Sensory System. Shawnee Mission (Kansas): AAPC Publishing.

By the LabO RNP team