Editorial: The Vestibular System in Cognitive and Memory Processes in Mammalians

Abstract

International audienceIn the nineteenth century Pierre–Jean–Marie Flourens (1825) and Ernst Mach described the vestibular system and its peripheral organs while Robert Barany, rewarded by the Nobel prize in 1914, was the first to investigate vestibular disorders with caloric tests making surgical treatments of the vestibular organ possible. Recently, Graf and Klam (2006) have reminded us that this ancient sensory system appeared more than 500 million years ago. Logically its influence would most likely not be restricted to balance reflexes at the brainstem level; it must have also shaped our brain. The vestibular system is the one sensory organ dedicated to gravity perception, which along with light and oxygen served as a motor of evolution. In the 1950s the groups of Otto–Joachim Grüsser in Germany, Wilder Penfield in Canada, and later the group of Alain Berthoz in France, demonstrated in elegant experiments on awake monkey (Guldin and Grüsser, 1998), epileptic patient (Penfield, 1957), and neurologically-normal human (Lobel et al., 1999) the existence of vestibular projections to the cortex and how they combine with visual and proprioceptive information. An increasing number of researchers, often fervent disciples, have built on these findings to produce a spate of publications that have consolidated the evidence for a sense of verticality and three-dimensional body representations within the vestibular cortical areas. In the 1990s Paul Smith and colleagues examined vestibular processing in the hippocampus and its role in spatial memory. Exploring this topic in the rodent (Smith, 1997), they began to elucidate the secrets and the previously silent functions of the vestibular system. These findings led to increasing clarity about how vestibular degeneration may be related to some aspects of dementia (Previc, 2013), psychiatric diseases (Gurvich et al., 2013), and cognitive impairments in the elderly (Bigelow et al., 2015; Semenov et al., 2015). The research by Marianne Dieterich and Thomas Brandt has examined the bilateral organization of multiple multisensory cortical areas and revealed the vestibular dominance of the non-dominant hemisphere (Dieterich et al., 2003). They addressed the following questions: how is one global percept of motion and orientation in space formed, and does this dominance determine the lateralization of brain function such as handedness (Brandt and Dieterich, 2015)? A vestibular contribution to the most crucial aspects of the human sense of self and self-consciousness has recently been highlighted by neurological and neuroscientific investigations: vestibular signals contribute to the experience that the self is located within the boundaries of the body (Blanke et al., 2004; Lopez et al., 2008) and may even be involved in self-other discrimination and interactions (Lenggenhager and Lopez, 2015).In this Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience Research Topic initiated by Sidney Simon, twenty-four articles highlight recent discoveries in the field of vestibular cognition, including: (1) Ana...

Cross-Modal Attention Effects in the Vestibular Cortex during Attentive Tracking of Moving Objects

“…Finally, our results contribute to an emerging field of research, referred to as "vestibular cognition" (for review, see Mast et al, 2014;Besnard et al, 2015). An increasing number of results suggests that various cognitive processes are subject to influences by the vestibular system and require vestibular input for normal functioning.…”

The development of a new questionnaire for cognitive complaints in vertigo: the Neuropsychological Vertigo Inventory (NVI)

“…However, in the general population, this term is frequently associated with symptoms in dizziness (feeling of being light-headed or 'swimmy'), visual perception, and/or balance. All these symptoms could be sustained by overlapping cerebral networks, notably the vestibular system [6][7][8]. Damage to this system could lead to vertigo/dizziness/imbalance, but also to more general cognitive or emotional complaints.…”

Effects of vestibular disorders on vestibular reflex and imagery

“…Motion reproduction or return may be perception, but not magnitude estimate : the cognitive transduction from perception to its report in degrees or meters makes the difference, and this needs an internal representation (that self-motion reproduction does not need), i.e., imagery. Spatial navigation is "more cognitive" than perception, and it corresponds to one of those nowadays established higher vestibular functions (Besnard et al 2015, Bigelow and Agrawal 2015, Lopez et al 2012, Lopez 2013.…”