vestibular facilitation of optic flow parsing前庭便利化光学流解析.pdfVIP

Vestibular Facilitation of Optic Flow Parsing 1 2 3 4 Paul R. MacNeilage *, Zhou Zhang , Gregory C. DeAngelis , Dora E. Angelaki 1Vertigo, Balance, and Oculomotor Research Center, University Hospital of Munich, Munich, Germany, 2 Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States of America, 3 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America, 4 Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of America Abstract Simultaneous object motion and self-motion give rise to complex patterns of retinal image motion. In order to estimate object motion accurately, the brain must parse this complex retinal motion into self-motion and object motion components. Although this computational problem can be solved, in principle, through purely visual mechanisms, extra- retinal information that arises from the vestibular system during self-motion may also play an important role. Here we investigate whether combining vestibular and visual self-motion information improves the precision of object motion estimates. Subjects were asked to discriminate the direction of object motion in the presence of simultaneous self-motion, depicted either by visual cues alone (i.e. optic flow) or by combined visual/vestibular stimuli. We report a small but significant improvement in object motion discrimination thresholds with the addition of vestibular cues. This improvement was greatest for eccentric heading directions and negligible for forward movement, a finding that could reflect increased relative reliability of vestibular versus visual cues for e