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Accumulation of Inertial Sensory Information in the Perception of Whole Body Yaw Rotation

While moving through the environment, our central nervous system accumulates sensory information over time to provide an estimate of our self-motion, allowing for completing crucial tasks such as maintaining balance. However, little is known on how the duration of the motion stimuli influences our p...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Nesti, Alessandro, de Winkel, Ksander, Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5268484/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28125681
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0170497
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author Nesti, Alessandro
de Winkel, Ksander
Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
author_facet Nesti, Alessandro
de Winkel, Ksander
Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
author_sort Nesti, Alessandro
collection PubMed
description While moving through the environment, our central nervous system accumulates sensory information over time to provide an estimate of our self-motion, allowing for completing crucial tasks such as maintaining balance. However, little is known on how the duration of the motion stimuli influences our performances in a self-motion discrimination task. Here we study the human ability to discriminate intensities of sinusoidal (0.5 Hz) self-rotations around the vertical axis (yaw) for four different stimulus durations (1, 2, 3 and 5 s) in darkness. In a typical trial, participants experienced two consecutive rotations of equal duration and different peak amplitude, and reported the one perceived as stronger. For each stimulus duration, we determined the smallest detectable change in stimulus intensity (differential threshold) for a reference velocity of 15 deg/s. Results indicate that differential thresholds decrease with stimulus duration and asymptotically converge to a constant, positive value. This suggests that the central nervous system accumulates sensory information on self-motion over time, resulting in improved discrimination performances. Observed trends in differential thresholds are consistent with predictions based on a drift diffusion model with leaky integration of sensory evidence.
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spelling pubmed-52684842017-02-06 Accumulation of Inertial Sensory Information in the Perception of Whole Body Yaw Rotation Nesti, Alessandro de Winkel, Ksander Bülthoff, Heinrich H. PLoS One Research Article While moving through the environment, our central nervous system accumulates sensory information over time to provide an estimate of our self-motion, allowing for completing crucial tasks such as maintaining balance. However, little is known on how the duration of the motion stimuli influences our performances in a self-motion discrimination task. Here we study the human ability to discriminate intensities of sinusoidal (0.5 Hz) self-rotations around the vertical axis (yaw) for four different stimulus durations (1, 2, 3 and 5 s) in darkness. In a typical trial, participants experienced two consecutive rotations of equal duration and different peak amplitude, and reported the one perceived as stronger. For each stimulus duration, we determined the smallest detectable change in stimulus intensity (differential threshold) for a reference velocity of 15 deg/s. Results indicate that differential thresholds decrease with stimulus duration and asymptotically converge to a constant, positive value. This suggests that the central nervous system accumulates sensory information on self-motion over time, resulting in improved discrimination performances. Observed trends in differential thresholds are consistent with predictions based on a drift diffusion model with leaky integration of sensory evidence. Public Library of Science 2017-01-26 /pmc/articles/PMC5268484/ /pubmed/28125681 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0170497 Text en © 2017 Nesti et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Nesti, Alessandro
de Winkel, Ksander
Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
Accumulation of Inertial Sensory Information in the Perception of Whole Body Yaw Rotation
title Accumulation of Inertial Sensory Information in the Perception of Whole Body Yaw Rotation
title_full Accumulation of Inertial Sensory Information in the Perception of Whole Body Yaw Rotation
title_fullStr Accumulation of Inertial Sensory Information in the Perception of Whole Body Yaw Rotation
title_full_unstemmed Accumulation of Inertial Sensory Information in the Perception of Whole Body Yaw Rotation
title_short Accumulation of Inertial Sensory Information in the Perception of Whole Body Yaw Rotation
title_sort accumulation of inertial sensory information in the perception of whole body yaw rotation
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5268484/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28125681
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0170497
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