Human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations

To successfully perform daily activities such as maintaining posture or running, humans need to be sensitive to self-motion over a large range of motion intensities. Recent studies have shown that the human ability to discriminate self-motion in the presence of either inertial-only motion cues or vi...

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Main Authors:	Nesti, Alessandro, Beykirch, Karl A., Pretto, Paolo, Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2015
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4646930/

id	pubmed-4646930
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-46469302015-11-23 Human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations Nesti, Alessandro Beykirch, Karl A. Pretto, Paolo Bülthoff, Heinrich H. Research Article To successfully perform daily activities such as maintaining posture or running, humans need to be sensitive to self-motion over a large range of motion intensities. Recent studies have shown that the human ability to discriminate self-motion in the presence of either inertial-only motion cues or visual-only motion cues is not constant but rather decreases with motion intensity. However, these results do not yet allow for a quantitative description of how self-motion is discriminated in the presence of combined visual and inertial cues, since little is known about visual–inertial perceptual integration and the resulting self-motion perception over a wide range of motion intensity. Here we investigate these two questions for head-centred yaw rotations (0.5 Hz) presented either in darkness or combined with visual cues (optical flow with limited lifetime dots). Participants discriminated a reference motion, repeated unchanged for every trial, from a comparison motion, iteratively adjusted in peak velocity so as to measure the participants’ differential threshold, i.e. the smallest perceivable change in stimulus intensity. A total of six participants were tested at four reference velocities (15, 30, 45 and 60 °/s). Results are combined for further analysis with previously published differential thresholds measured for visual-only yaw rotation cues using the same participants and procedure. Overall, differential thresholds increase with stimulus intensity following a trend described well by three power functions with exponents of 0.36, 0.62 and 0.49 for inertial, visual and visual–inertial stimuli, respectively. Despite the different exponents, differential thresholds do not depend on the type of sensory input significantly, suggesting that combining visual and inertial stimuli does not lead to improved discrimination performance over the investigated range of yaw rotations. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2015-08-30 2015 /pmc/articles/PMC4646930/ /pubmed/26319547 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4426-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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	Nesti, Alessandro Beykirch, Karl A. Pretto, Paolo Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
spellingShingle	Nesti, Alessandro Beykirch, Karl A. Pretto, Paolo Bülthoff, Heinrich H. Human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations
author_facet	Nesti, Alessandro Beykirch, Karl A. Pretto, Paolo Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
author_sort	Nesti, Alessandro
title	Human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations
title_short	Human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations
title_full	Human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations
title_fullStr	Human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations
title_full_unstemmed	Human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations
title_sort	human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations
description	To successfully perform daily activities such as maintaining posture or running, humans need to be sensitive to self-motion over a large range of motion intensities. Recent studies have shown that the human ability to discriminate self-motion in the presence of either inertial-only motion cues or visual-only motion cues is not constant but rather decreases with motion intensity. However, these results do not yet allow for a quantitative description of how self-motion is discriminated in the presence of combined visual and inertial cues, since little is known about visual–inertial perceptual integration and the resulting self-motion perception over a wide range of motion intensity. Here we investigate these two questions for head-centred yaw rotations (0.5 Hz) presented either in darkness or combined with visual cues (optical flow with limited lifetime dots). Participants discriminated a reference motion, repeated unchanged for every trial, from a comparison motion, iteratively adjusted in peak velocity so as to measure the participants’ differential threshold, i.e. the smallest perceivable change in stimulus intensity. A total of six participants were tested at four reference velocities (15, 30, 45 and 60 °/s). Results are combined for further analysis with previously published differential thresholds measured for visual-only yaw rotation cues using the same participants and procedure. Overall, differential thresholds increase with stimulus intensity following a trend described well by three power functions with exponents of 0.36, 0.62 and 0.49 for inertial, visual and visual–inertial stimuli, respectively. Despite the different exponents, differential thresholds do not depend on the type of sensory input significantly, suggesting that combining visual and inertial stimuli does not lead to improved discrimination performance over the investigated range of yaw rotations.
publisher	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
publishDate	2015
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4646930/
_version_	1613501884958507008

Human discrimination of head-centred visual–inertial yaw rotations

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