Are we heading in the right direction?

Are You Heading in the Right Direction?

Visual Vestibular Interactions for Self Motion Estimation

Accurate perception of self-motion through cluttered environments involves a coordinated set of sensorimotor processes that encode and compare information from visual, vestibular, proprioceptive, motor-corollary, and cognitive inputs. Our goal was to investigate the visual and vestibular cues to the direction of linear self-motion (heading direction). In the vestibular experiment, blindfolded p...

Stroke affects locomotor steering responses to changing optic flow directions.

BACKGROUND Stroke patients manifest steering difficulties during walking, which may arise from an altered perception of visual motion. OBJECTIVE To examine the ability of stroke patients to control their heading direction while walking in a virtual environment (VE) describing translational optic flows (OFs) expanding from different directions. METHODS The authors evaluated 10 stroke patient...

Predicting the present direction of heading

Humans perceive heading accurately when they rotate their eyes. This is remarkable, because (1) the pursuit eye movement makes the retinal flow more complicated; and (2) the eye rotation causes a continuous change of the heading direction on the retina. The first problem prevents a simple association of the centre of flow on the retina with the heading direction. To solve it, the brain needs to...

Determining optimal distance from outlet of auxiliary forcing ventilation system to development of heading in underground mines

Auxiliary ventilation of the blind development heading in underground mines is one of the most challenging work activities amongst mining underground operations. The auxiliary forcing ventilation system provides positive pressure, cooling, controlling gas layering, and removing diesel fumes and dust levels from development headings, stopes, and services facilities. The effectiveness of the auxi...

Gaze direction affects linear self-motion heading discrimination in humans.

We investigated the effect of eye-in-head and head-on-trunk direction on heading discrimination. Participants were passively translated in darkness along linear trajectories in the horizontal plane deviating 2° or 5° to the right or left of straight-ahead as defined by the subject's trunk. Participants had to report whether the experienced translation was to the right or left of the trunk strai...