Convergence of Motion Parallax and Vestibular Signals for Self-Motion

用于自我运动的运动视差和前庭信号的收敛

• 批准号: 0719639
• 负责人: Douglas Hanes
• 金额: $ 10万
• 依托单位: Legacy Emanuel Hospital and Health Center
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-09-01 至 2008-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0719639&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Convergence; Motion; Parallax; Vestibular; Signals

As a person walks on a sidewalk or drives down a street, he or she detects optic flow that informs of the speed and direction of movement, as well as the distances of objects in the environment. Unlike a viewer looking down from above, who would see the person as moving through a fixed environment, the moving person sees objects in the visual field expand as they are approached, or move off to the side as they are passed. Using this flow to sense and control one's own movement might appear to be a difficult computational problem, and yet people still do it all the time. The visual system does have help, though; in particular, the vestibular system, with its acceleration sensors in the inner ear, detects the directions of rotations and translations of the head independently of vision. Having some redundancy between the two types of sensors is a good thing, because both are subject to errors, and because the two are effective at sensing different types of movements. A major issue is to understand how the visual and vestibular senses work together in sensing and controlling the body's motion through the environment. While each sense has been heavily studied on its own, how they fit together has received relatively little attention, at least for translational movement through a natural environment.With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Douglas Hanes will begin to address the processes by which visual and vestibular signals together inform about self-motion. The focus of his work will be on mathematically modeling the optimal integration of visual and vestibular information in the central nervous system. It is known that visual signals associated with a rotation of the head?the global flow on the retina in a direction opposite to head or eye rotations?converge with vestibular signals for the same head rotation in movement centers of the brain. Understanding a similar convergence for translational motion is harder, because the visual flow that results is much more complex, and successful modeling of this convergence will require the use of more sophisticated mathematical techniques. By elucidating the ways in which these senses complement one another, and by proposing a specific model of integration, the research will help bring together knowledge from independent research carried out on the visual and vestibular systems. The results should shed light on vexing questions about how humans can estimate distances traveled or trajectories of motion with only one sense or the other, or what happens when the two senses conflict. The results of this work will not only help us better understand multi-sensory function, but will have implications about how problems may arise in the perception and control of self motion while flying or driving.

当一个人走在人行道上或在街上开车时，他或她会检测到光流，光流告诉他运动的速度和方向，以及环境中物体的距离。不像从上方向下看的人，他会看到这个人在一个固定的环境中移动，移动的人会看到视野中的物体随着它们的接近而扩大，或者在它们经过时移到一边。使用这种流来感知和控制自己的运动似乎是一个困难的计算问题，但人们仍然一直在这样做。不过，视觉系统确实有帮助；尤其是前庭系统，它的加速传感器在内耳，检测旋转的方向和头部的平移独立于视觉。在两种类型的传感器之间有一些冗余是一件好事，因为两者都容易出错，因为两者在感知不同类型的运动时是有效的。一个主要的问题是了解视觉和前庭感官如何在感知和控制身体在环境中的运动中协同工作。虽然人们对每种感觉都进行了大量的研究，但它们如何结合在一起却很少受到关注，至少对于通过自然环境的翻译运动来说是这样。在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的资助下，道格拉斯·哈内斯（Douglas Hanes）博士将开始研究视觉和前庭信号共同告知自我运动的过程。他的工作重点将是在数学建模视觉和前庭信息在中枢神经系统的最佳整合。众所周知，视觉信号与头部旋转有关。视网膜上的整体流动方向与头部或眼睛旋转方向相反？与前庭信号汇合，在大脑的运动中心进行相同的头部旋转。理解平移运动的类似收敛是比较困难的，因为由此产生的视觉流要复杂得多，而且这种收敛的成功建模将需要使用更复杂的数学技术。通过阐明这些感官相互补充的方式，并通过提出一个特定的整合模型，该研究将有助于汇集视觉和前庭系统独立研究的知识。这一结果将有助于解决一些令人烦恼的问题：人类如何仅凭一种感觉来估计行进的距离或运动轨迹，或者当两种感觉发生冲突时会发生什么。这项工作的结果不仅将帮助我们更好地理解多感官功能，而且将对飞行或驾驶时自我运动的感知和控制可能出现的问题产生影响。