Maintaining an upright posture on the moon is not easy. NASA documents abound with examples of astronauts falling on the moon during the visits between 1969 and 1972 (19,20). Even on the most recent moon visit (Apollo 17, 1972), Astronaut Harrison Schmidt fell over as he worked on the lunar surface.1 However, although regarded as highly desirable (7), few studies have investigated the perceptua...

INTRODUCTION Balance deficits are identified as important risk factors for falling in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, the specific use of proprioception, which is of primary importance during balance control, has not been studied in individuals with COPD. The objective was to determine the specific proprioceptive control strategy during postural balance i...

Aging is frequently associated with a decreased postural stability, essentially after 60 years, leading to an increased risk of falling. In this article we propose to highlight the influence of the aging of the neuromuscular system on postural stability when standing upright. To maintain balance while standing upright, human needs to control the activity of ankle muscles and particularly the pl...

"Pusher syndrome" is a clinical disorder following left or right brain damage in which patients actively push away from the nonhemiparetic side, leading to a loss of postural balance. The mechanism underlying this disorder and its related anatomy have only recently been identified. Investigation of patients with severe pushing behavior has shown that perception of body posture in relation to gr...

The authors examined whether infants of about I year return to 2-handed reaching when they begin to walk independently. Infants (N = 9) were followed longitudinally before, during, and after their transition to upright locomotion. Every week, the infants' reaching responses and patterns of interlimb coordination were screened in 3 tasks involving different adaptive reaching responses. Before th...

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Direction of balance and perception of the upright are perceptually dissociable 11 12 13 *Heather Panic1,2, Alexander Sacha Panic1,3, Paul DiZio1,2,3, James Lackner1,2,3 14 15 16 17 1Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory, 2Volen Center for Complex Systems, 3Department 18 of Psychology 19 Brandeis University 20 21 22 23 *Corresponding author 24 Heather Panic 25 Ashton...

Background. The cause of frequent falling in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (AD) is not weil understood. Distraction from incongruent visual stimuli may be an important factor as suggested by their poor performance in tests of shifting visual attention in other studies. The purpose of this study was to determine whether AD patients have difficulty maintaining upright balance under...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between physical function and postural sway during local vibratory stimulation of middle-aged subjects in an upright position. [Subjects] The subjects were 25 healthy community-dwelling middle-aged people. [Methods] We measured postural sway using a Wii board while vibratory stimulations of 30, 60, or 240 Hz were applied to the...