Vestibular Signals
vestibular signals
The vestibular system: a multimodal sense
The vestibular system plays an essential role in everyday life, contributing to a surprising range of functions from reflexes to the highest levels of perception and consciousness. Three orthogonal semicircular canals detect rotational movements of the head and the otolith organs sense translational acceleration, including the gravitational vertical. But, how vestibular signals are encoded by the human brain? We have recently combined innovative methods for eliciting virtual rotation and translation sensations with fMRI to identify brain areas representing vestibular signals. We have identified a bilateral inferior parietal, ventral premotor/anterior insula and prefrontal network and confirmed that these areas reliably possess information about the rotation and translation. We have also investigated how vestibular signals are integrated with other sensory cues to generate our perception of the external environment.
Multisensory encoding of self-motion in the retrosplenial cortex and beyond
In order to successfully navigate through the environment, animals must accurately estimate the status of their motion with respect to the surrounding scene and objects. In this talk, I will present our recent work on how retrosplenial cortical (RSC) neurons combine vestibular and visual signals to reliably encode the direction and speed of head turns during passive motion and active navigation. I will discuss these data in the context of RSC long-range connectivity and further show our ongoing work on building population-level models of motion representation across cortical and subcortical networks.
Inter- and Intra-hemispheric Sources of Vestibular Signals to V1
Neuromatch 5