Motor Performance of Asymptomatic and Chronic Neck Pain Participants Pre- and Post-spinal Manipulation Using an Eye and Head Movement Fitts' Task

The purpose of this study is to measure the effects of cervical spine manipulation on the motor performance of participants with and without chronic neck pain.

The objective of this pre/post design study is to apply spinal manipulation of the cervical spine to participants with chronic neck pain and participants who are asymptomatic for neck pain, and to measure the subsequent changes of movement time of the eyes during an eye movement Fitts' task using eye-tracker technology.

This study will also include a head movement Fitts' task, which has been previously shown to identify a reduction in head movement time in participants after receiving cervical spine manipulation. The head movement task, which has a biomechanical basis, will serve as a comparator to the eye movement task, which has a neurophysiologic basis. Changes in head and eye movement time are both measures of motor performance.

The hypothesis for the eye movement Fitts' task, is that the eye movement time will be increase with larger distances between targets and will not be affected by changes in target width. It is anticipated that the eye movement time will reduce in the neck pain group following spinal manipulation in comparison to the asymptomatic group. We hypothesize that during the head movement task, symptomatic participants will experience a decrease in head movement time as compared to the asymptomatic group after spinal manipulation. We further hypothesize that head movement time will be increase with larger target distances and smaller target widths.