Human standing is modified by an unconscious integration of congruent sensory and motor signals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Key points Electrical vestibular stimulation delivered at the mastoid processes evokes a reflex response in the appendicular muscles only when they are actively involved in keeping the unsupported head and body balanced. We show that the vestibular‐evoked muscle response was present during a task that simulated the control of standing where sensory feedback was congruent with the motor‐generated expectation to balance the body, and absent when sensory feedback did not match. The present results indicate that the task dependency of the vestibular‐evoked muscle response relies on congruent sensory and motor signals, and that this is organised in the absence of a conscious perception of postural control. These findings help us understand how our brain combines sensory and motor signals to provide an internal representation of standing balance that can be used to assess whether a perturbation poses a postural threat. Abstract We investigate whether the muscle response evoked by an electrically induced vestibular perturbation during standing is related to congruent sensory and motor signals. A robotic platform that simulated the mechanics of a standing person was used to manipulate the relationship between the action of the calf muscles and the movement of the body. Subjects braced on top of the platform with the ankles sway referenced to its motion were required to balance its simulated body‐like load by modulating ankle plantar‐flexor torque. Here, afferent signals of body motion were congruent with the motor command to the calf muscles to balance the body. Stochastic vestibular stimulation (±4 mA, 0–25 Hz) applied during this task evoked a biphasic response in both soleus muscles that was similar to the response observed during standing for all subjects. When the body was rotated through the same motion experienced during the balancing task, a small muscle response was observed in only the right soleus and in only half of the subjects. However, the timing and shape of this response did not resemble the vestibular‐evoked response obtained during standing. When the balancing task was interspersed with periods of computer‐controlled platform rotations that emulated the balancing motion so that subjects thought that they were constantly balancing the platform, coherence between the input vestibular stimulus and soleus electromyogram activity decreased significantly ( P < 0.05) during the period when plantar‐flexor activity did not affect the motion of the body. The decrease in coherence occurred at 175 ms after the transition to computer‐controlled motion, which subjects did not detect until after 2247 ms (Confidence Interval 1801, 2693), and then only half of the time. Our results indicate that the response to an electrically induced vestibular perturbation is organised in the absence of conscious perception when sensory feedback is congruent with the underlying motor behaviour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".