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The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 84 No. 1 July 2000, pp. 11-27
Copyright ©2000 by the American Physiological Society
Department of Medical Physics and Biophysics, University of Nijmegen, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Van Beuzekom, A. D. and
J.A.M. Van Gisbergen.
Properties of the Internal Representation of Gravity Inferred
From Spatial-Direction and Body-Tilt Estimates. J. Neurophysiol. 84: 11-27, 2000. One of the key
questions in spatial perception is whether the brain has a common
representation of gravity that is generally accessible for various
perceptual orientation tasks. To evaluate this idea, we compared the
ability of six tilted subjects to indicate earth-centric directions in
the dark with a visual and an oculomotor paradigm and to estimate their
body tilt relative to gravity. Subjective earth-horizontal and
-vertical data were collected, either by adjusting a visual line or by
making saccades, at 37 roll-tilt angles across the entire range. These
spatial perception responses and the associated body-tilt estimates
were subjected to a principal-component analysis to describe their tilt
dependence. This analysis allowed us to separate systematic and random
errors in performance, to disentangle the effects of task (horizontal vs. vertical) and paradigm (visual vs. oculomotor) in the
space-perception data, and to compare the veridicality of space
perception and the sense of self-tilt. In all spatial-orientation
tests, whether involving space-perception or body-tilt judgments,
subjects made considerable systematic errors which mostly betrayed tilt
underestimation [Aubert effect (A effect)] and peaked near 130°
tilt. However, the A effect was much smaller in body-tilt estimates
than in spatial pointing, implying that the underlying signal
processing must have been different. Pointing results obtained with the
visual and the oculomotor paradigm were not identical either, but these differences, which were task-related (horizontal vs. vertical), were
subtle in comparison. The tilt-dependent pattern of random errors
(noisy scatter) was almost identical in visual and oculomotor pointing
results, showing a steep monotonic increase with tilt angle, but was
again clearly different in the body-tilt estimates. These findings are
discussed in the context of a conceptual model in an attempt to explain
how the different patterns of systematic and random errors in
external-space and self-tilt perception may come about. The scheme
proposes that basically similar computational mechanisms, working with
different settings, may be responsible.
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