Multisensory Interactions between Vestibular, Visual and Somatosensory Signals

Vestibular inputs are constantly processed and integrated with signals from other sensory modalities, such as vision and touch. The multiply-connected nature of vestibular cortical anatomy led us to investigate whether vestibular signals could participate in a multi-way interaction with visual and s...

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Main Authors:	Ferrè, Elisa Raffaella, Walther, Leif Erik, Haggard, Patrick
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2015
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4395320/

id	pubmed-4395320
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-43953202015-04-21 Multisensory Interactions between Vestibular, Visual and Somatosensory Signals Ferrè, Elisa Raffaella Walther, Leif Erik Haggard, Patrick Research Article Vestibular inputs are constantly processed and integrated with signals from other sensory modalities, such as vision and touch. The multiply-connected nature of vestibular cortical anatomy led us to investigate whether vestibular signals could participate in a multi-way interaction with visual and somatosensory perception. We used signal detection methods to identify whether vestibular stimulation might interact with both visual and somatosensory events in a detection task. Participants were instructed to detect near-threshold somatosensory stimuli that were delivered to the left index finger in one half of experimental trials. A visual signal occurred close to the finger in half of the trials, independent of somatosensory stimuli. A novel Near infrared caloric vestibular stimulus (NirCVS) was used to artificially activate the vestibular organs. Sham stimulations were used to control for non-specific effects of NirCVS. We found that both visual and vestibular events increased somatosensory sensitivity. Critically, we found no evidence for supra-additive multisensory enhancement when both visual and vestibular signals were administered together: in fact, we found a trend towards sub-additive interaction. The results are compatible with a vestibular role in somatosensory gain regulation. Public Library of Science 2015-04-13 /pmc/articles/PMC4395320/ /pubmed/25875819 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124573 Text en © 2015 Ferrè 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, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Ferrè, Elisa Raffaella Walther, Leif Erik Haggard, Patrick
spellingShingle	Ferrè, Elisa Raffaella Walther, Leif Erik Haggard, Patrick Multisensory Interactions between Vestibular, Visual and Somatosensory Signals
author_facet	Ferrè, Elisa Raffaella Walther, Leif Erik Haggard, Patrick
author_sort	Ferrè, Elisa Raffaella
title	Multisensory Interactions between Vestibular, Visual and Somatosensory Signals
title_short	Multisensory Interactions between Vestibular, Visual and Somatosensory Signals
title_full	Multisensory Interactions between Vestibular, Visual and Somatosensory Signals
title_fullStr	Multisensory Interactions between Vestibular, Visual and Somatosensory Signals
title_full_unstemmed	Multisensory Interactions between Vestibular, Visual and Somatosensory Signals
title_sort	multisensory interactions between vestibular, visual and somatosensory signals
description	Vestibular inputs are constantly processed and integrated with signals from other sensory modalities, such as vision and touch. The multiply-connected nature of vestibular cortical anatomy led us to investigate whether vestibular signals could participate in a multi-way interaction with visual and somatosensory perception. We used signal detection methods to identify whether vestibular stimulation might interact with both visual and somatosensory events in a detection task. Participants were instructed to detect near-threshold somatosensory stimuli that were delivered to the left index finger in one half of experimental trials. A visual signal occurred close to the finger in half of the trials, independent of somatosensory stimuli. A novel Near infrared caloric vestibular stimulus (NirCVS) was used to artificially activate the vestibular organs. Sham stimulations were used to control for non-specific effects of NirCVS. We found that both visual and vestibular events increased somatosensory sensitivity. Critically, we found no evidence for supra-additive multisensory enhancement when both visual and vestibular signals were administered together: in fact, we found a trend towards sub-additive interaction. The results are compatible with a vestibular role in somatosensory gain regulation.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2015
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4395320/
_version_	1613211132698296320

Multisensory Interactions between Vestibular, Visual and Somatosensory Signals

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