Suppression of visually evoked postural responses

Abstract

Normal subjects standing on an earth-fixed force platform inside a movable room displaced at velocities comparable to those accompanying spontaneous body sway, exhibit a visually evoked postural response (VEPR) some 600 ms after the start of the room movement. It consists of a displacement of the centre of force of the body in the direction of the stimulus (primary component), followed shortly by a corrective displacement in the opposite (secondary component). On second presentation of the stimulus VEPR is markedly reduced, but only if full proprioceptive information from the lower limbs is available to the subjects. A patient deprived of this information showed much enhanced VEPR which he was unable to suppress, in contrast to a patient with absent vestibular function who presented normal VEPR. The results show that in the presence of conflict between different sensory clues, vision is initially dominant in sway control, although adaptive processes can quickly rearrange this hierarchy.