The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of caloric vestibular stimulation on the postural sway characteristics of hemiparetic patients. Two groups of 15 hemiparetic patients each (right and left) were compared to a group of 15 control subjects. Hemiplegic patients were selected for the study if they showed ability to stand without external support for at least 30 seconds. Postu...

Information from the vestibular peripheral organs in the inner ear is integrated with several other classes of signals about the body, generated by eyes, muscles and joints. The resulting signals provide a coherent sense of body posture and orientation in surrounding space. In this project, the vestibular organs of healthy volunteers were stimulated noninvasively. Participants made judgements a...

A growing number of studies in humans demonstrate the involvement of vestibular information in tasks that are seemingly remote from well-known functions such as space constancy or postural control. In this review article we point out three emerging streams of research highlighting the importance of vestibular input: (1) Spatial Cognition: Modulation of vestibular signals can induce specific cha...

Anatomical studies have demonstrated that the vestibular nuclei project to nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS), but little is known about the effects of vestibular inputs on NTS neuronal activity. Furthermore, lesions of NTS abolish vomiting elicited by a variety of different triggering mechanisms, including vestibular stimulation, suggesting that emetic inputs may converge on the same NTS neurons...

The nystagmus in patients with vestibular disorders often has an eye position dependency, called Alexander's law, where the slow phase velocity is higher with gaze in the fast phase direction compared with gaze in the slow phase direction. Alexander's law has been hypothesized to arise either due to adaptive changes in the velocity-to-position neural integrator, or as a consequence of processin...

The mouse has become an important model system for studying the cellular basis of learning and coding of heading by the vestibular system. Here we recorded from single neurons in the vestibular nuclei to understand how vestibular pathways encode self-motion under natural conditions, during which proprioceptive and motor-related signals as well as vestibular inputs provide feedback about an anim...