Integration of visual and vestibular information used to discriminate rotational self-motion

Florian Soyka

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

florian.soyka@tuebingen.mpg.de

Ksander de Winkel

Utrecht University

Michael Barnett-Cowan

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

Eric Groen

TNO – Perceptual & Cognitive Systems

Heinrich H Bülthoff

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

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Do humans integrate visual and vestibular information in a statistically optimal fashion when discriminating rotational self-motion stimuli? Recent studies are inconclusive as to whether such integration occurs when discriminating heading direction. In the present study eight participants were consecutively rotated twice (2s sinusoidal acceleration) on a chair about an earth-vertical axis in vestibular-only, visual-only and visual-vestibular trials. The visual stimulus was a video of a moving stripe pattern, synchronized with the inertial motion. Peak acceleration of the reference stimulus was varied and participants reported which rotation was perceived as faster. Just-noticeable differences (JND) were estimated by fitting psychometric functions. The visual-vestibular JND measurements are too high compared to the predictions based on the unimodal JND estimates and there is no JND reduction between visual-vestibular and visual-alone estimates. These findings may be explained by visual capture. Alternatively, the visual precision may not be equal between visual-vestibular and visual-alone conditions, since it has been shown that visual motion sensitivity is reduced during inertial self-motion. Therefore, measuring visual-alone JNDs with an underlying uncorrelated inertial motion might yield higher visual-alone JNDs compared to the stationary measurement. Theoretical calculations show that higher visual-alone JNDs would result in predictions consistent with the JND measurements for the visual-vestibular condition.


Cite as: Soyka F, de Winkel K , Barnett-Cowan M, Groen E, Bülthoff H H, 2011, "Integration of visual and vestibular information used to discriminate rotational self-motion" i-Perception 2(8) 855
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DOI: 10.1068/ic855

ISSN: 2041-6695 (electronic only)

Copyright: Copyright is retained by the author(s) of this article. This open-access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Licence, which permits noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author(s) and source are credited and no alterations are made.
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