Up, Down, Near, Far: An Online Vestibular Contribution to Distance Judgement.

ABSTRACT: Whether a visual stimulus seems near or far away depends partly on its vertical elevation. Contrasting theories suggest either that perception of distance could vary with elevation, because of memory of previous upwards efforts in climbing to overcome gravity, or because of fear of falling associated with the downwards direction. The vestibular system provides a fundamental signal for the downward direction of gravity, but the relation between this signal and depth perception remains unexplored. Here we report an experiment on vestibular contributions to depth perception, using Virtual Reality. We asked participants to judge the absolute distance of an object presented on a plane at different elevations during brief artificial vestibular inputs. Relative to distance estimates collected wit

SUBMITTER: Torok A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5235368 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature