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J Neurophysiol 99: 1969-1982, 2008. First published December 5, 2007; doi:10.1152/jn.00889.2007
0022-3077/08 $8.00
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Vestibular Nuclei and Cerebellum Put Visual Gravitational Motion in Context

William L. Miller1,2, Vincenzo Maffei1, Gianfranco Bosco3,4, Marco Iosa1, Myrka Zago1, Emiliano Macaluso2 and Francesco Lacquaniti1,3,4

1Department of Neuromotor Physiology and 2Neuroimaging Laboratory, Santa Lucia Foundation; and 3Department of Neuroscience and 4Center of Space Biomedicine, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy

Submitted 10 August 2007; accepted in final form 3 December 2007

Animal survival in the forest, and human success on the sports field, often depend on the ability to seize a target on the fly. All bodies fall at the same rate in the gravitational field, but the corresponding retinal motion varies with apparent viewing distance. How then does the brain predict time-to-collision under gravity? A perspective context from natural or pictorial settings might afford accurate predictions of gravity's effects via the recovery of an environmental reference from the scene structure. We report that embedding motion in a pictorial scene facilitates interception of gravitational acceleration over unnatural acceleration, whereas a blank scene eliminates such bias. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed blood-oxygen-level-dependent correlates of these visual context effects on gravitational motion processing in the vestibular nuclei and posterior cerebellar vermis. Our results suggest an early stage of integration of high-level visual analysis with gravity-related motion information, which may represent the substrate for perceptual constancy of ubiquitous gravitational motion.

Address for reprint requests and other correspondence: W. L. Miller, Dept. of Neuromotor Physiology, Santa Lucia Foundation, via Ardeatina 306, 00179 Rome, Italy (E-mail: w.miller{at}vegascientific.com)




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