The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 88 No. 4 October 2002, pp. 2104-2113
Copyright ©2002 by the American Physiological Society

Asymmetric Integration Recorded From Vestibular-Only Cells in Response to Position Transients

Departments of  ¹Physiology and  ²Otolarynglogy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A8, Canada

Musallam, Sam and R. D. Tomlinson. Asymmetric Integration Recorded From Vestibular-Only Cells in Response to Position Transients. J. Neurophysiol. 88: 2104-2113, 2002. Angular and translational accelerations excite the semicircular canals and otolith organs, respectively. While canal afferents approximately encode head angular velocity due to the biomechanical integration performed by the canals, otolith signals have been found to approximate head translational acceleration. Because central vestibular pathways require velocity and position signals for their operation, the question has been raised as to how the integration of the otolith signals is accomplished. We recorded responses from 62 vestibular-only neurons in the vestibular nucleus of two monkeys to position transients in the naso-occipital and interaural orientations and varying directions in between. Responses to the transients were directionally asymmetric; one direction elicited a response that approximated the integral of the acceleration of the stimulus. In the opposite direction, the cells simply encoded the acceleration of the motion. We present a model that suggests that a neural integrator is not needed. Instead a neuron with a long membrane time constant and an excitatory postsynaptic potential duration that increases with the firing rate of the presynaptic cell can emulate the observed behavior.