Balancing bistable perception during self-motion

Abstract

In two experiments we investigated whether bistable visual perception is influenced by passive own body displacements due to vestibular stimulation. For this we passively rotated our participants around the vertical (yaw) axis while observing different rotating bistable stimuli (bodily or non-bodily) with different ambiguous motion directions. Based on previous work on multimodal effects on bistable perception, we hypothesized that vestibular stimulation should alter bistable perception and that the effects should differ for bodily versus non-bodily stimuli. In the first experiment, it was found that the rotation bias (i.e., the difference between the percentage of time that a CW or CCW rotation was perceived) was selectively modulated by vestibular stimulation: the perceived duration of the bodily stimuli was longer for the rotation direction congruent with the subject's own body rotation, whereas the opposite was true for the non-bodily stimulus (Necker cube). The results found in the second experiment extend the findings from the first experiment and show that these vestibular effects on bistable perception only occur when the axis of rotation of the bodily stimulus matches the axis of passive own body rotation. These findings indicate that the effect of vestibular stimulation on the rotation bias depends on the stimulus that is presented and the rotation axis of the stimulus. Although most studies on vestibular processing have traditionally focused on multisensory signal integration for posture, balance, and heading direction, the present data show that vestibular self-motion influences the perception of bistable bodily stimuli revealing the importance of vestibular mechanisms for visual consciousness.

Vestibular-Somatosensory Interactions: Effects of Passive Whole-Body Rotation on Somatosensory Detection

“…The experiment was conducted in complete darkness in a sound-shielded room in which a human motion platform was placed (see also [25]). Whole-body passive rotations were performed around the yaw axis by placing participants in a chair mounted on a two meters beam platform fixed on a digitally controlled electrical engine.…”

Bidirectional Modulation of Numerical Magnitude

“…Accordingly, based upon the aforementioned results from neuropsychological studies and the proposed overlapping neural networks between attentional mechanisms, vestibular function, and numerical cognition ( Corbetta and Shulman 2002 ; Dehaene et al 2003 ; Dieterich et al 2003 ; Cohen Kadosh et al 2007 ; Umiltà et al 2009 ; van Elk and Blanke 2012 ), we hypothesized that numerical allocation would be subject to the same control mechanism underpinning both spatial attention and vestibular cortical processing, namely dynamic interhemispheric competition ( Szczepanski and Kastner 2013 ; Arshad et al 2014 ).…”

Directional Bias for Vertical Integration of Motion Trajectories

“…Recent physiological evidence increasingly suggests that motor experience may be crucial to the visual process (e.g., Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996). The perceived direction of ambiguously moving objects can sometimes be biased by concurrent self-motion (Mitsumatsu, 2009; van Elk & Blanke, 2012; Wohlschläger, 2000). Moreover, several studies provided evidence for the influence of long-term motor or visuomotor experiences on bistable motion perception.…”