Abstract
Despite the close interrelation between vestibular and visual processing (e.g., vestibulo-ocular reflex), surprisingly little is known about vestibular function in visually impaired people. In this study, we investigated thresholds of passive whole-body motion discrimination (leftward vs. rightward) in nine visually impaired participants and nine age-matched sighted controls. Participants were rotated in yaw, tilted in roll, and translated along the interaural axis at two different frequencies (0.33 and 2 Hz) by means of a motion platform. Superior performance of visually impaired participants was found in the 0.33 Hz roll tilt condition. No differences were observed in the other motion conditions. Roll tilts stimulate the semicircular canals and otoliths simultaneously. The results could thus reflect a specific improvement in canal–otolith integration in the visually impaired and are consistent with the compensatory hypothesis, which implies that the visually impaired are able to compensate the absence of visual input.
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Notes
“Blindness” is defined as a visual acuity <5 % or a visual acuity worse than 3/60 on the Snellen chart, respectively. A visual acuity between 3/60 and 6/60 is referred to as “severe visual impairment” (World Health Organization 2013).
A minimum reversal occurs when a participant provides the wrong answer and the stimulus level increases accordingly. A maximum reversal occurs when the subject correctly detects three subsequent motion stimuli after having made an error on the previous trial. See Figure 3 in Hartmann et al. (2014) for an example of a procedure.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Vanda Lory for technical assistance and both Patrick Kilchör and Katharina Engelhart for help in recruiting visually impaired participants. This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Sinergia Grant “Balancing Self and Body”, CRSII1_125135) and a postdoctoral fellowship awarded to Luzia Grabherr.
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Moser, I., Grabherr, L., Hartmann, M. et al. Self-motion direction discrimination in the visually impaired. Exp Brain Res 233, 3221–3230 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4389-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4389-3