Inter-trial phase coherence of visually evoked postural responses in virtual reality

Vision plays a central role in maintaining balance. When humans perceive their body as moving, they trigger counter movements. This results in body sway, which has typically been investigated by measuring the body’s center of pressure (COP). Here, we aimed to induce visually evoked postural responses (VEPR) by simulating self-motion in virtual reality (VR) using a sinusoidally oscillating “moving room” paradigm. Ten healthy subjects participated in the experiment. Stimulation consisted of a 3D-cloud of random dots, presented through a VR headset, which oscillated sinusoidally in the anterior–posterior direction at different frequencies. We used a force platform to measure subjects’ COP over time and quantified the resulting trajectory by wavelet analyses including inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC). Subjects exhibited significant coupling of their COP to the respective stimulus. Even when spectral analysis of postural sway showed only small responses in the expected frequency bands (power), ITPC revealed an almost constant strength of coupling to the stimulus within but also across subjects and presented frequencies. Remarkably, ITPC even revealed a strong phase coupling to stimulation at 1.5 Hz, which exceeds the frequency range that has generally been attributed to the coupling of human postural sway to an oscillatory visual scenery. These findings suggest phase-locking to be an essential feature of visuomotor control.