Balance control threshold to vestibular stimuli
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bipedalism renders our erect posture unstable, requiring the integration and processing of multisensory information to remain upright. To understand how each sense contributes to balance, perceptual thresholds to isolated sensory disturbances while standing are typically quantified. Perception, however, is distinct from balance control. Both processes rely on distinct internal body representations, and participants can misattribute the consequences of self-generated balance-correcting actions as an external perturbation. Here, we used signal detection theory to quantify non-perceptual balance control thresholds to isolated vestibular stimuli given the role of vestibular cues in generating balance-correcting responses. We exposed participants standing on force plates to electrical vestibular stimulation (EVS) at varying amplitudes (0.2, 0.4, 0.6 mA) and frequencies (0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1 Hz). Stimuli delivered at 0.2 mA (0.1-0.5 Hz) and 0.4 mA (0.1, 0.2 Hz) remained unperceived but evoked whole-body responses above the sensorimotor noise underlying balance control. Balance control thresholds ranged from 0.09 to 0.57 mA; they increased with EVS amplitude and decreased with frequency. The physiological mechanisms underlying these EVS amplitude and frequency effects involved a decrease in response gain with increased stimulus amplitude and a reduction in response variability with increased stimulus frequency. Our findings demonstrate that balance responses to isolated vestibular stimuli can be quantified below perceptual thresholds and highlight the dynamic regulation of response gain and the influence of whole-body motion variability in the vestibular control of balance. Our results also open the door to assessing the isolated vestibular contributions to postural control in people with balance impairments. KEY POINTS: Upright balance control relies on sensory information from multiple sensory systems, but balance control thresholds to isolated sensory stimuli remain largely unknown because these stimuli, or their associated responses, can be perceived. We applied isolated electrical vestibular perturbations and used signal detection theory to quantify balance control thresholds to unperceived sensory stimuli. Vestibular stimuli delivered at 0.2 mA (0.1-0.5 Hz) and 0.4 mA (0.1 and 0.2 Hz) remained unperceived but evoked balance-correcting responses above the sensorimotor noise underlying the control of standing. Balance thresholds increased with current amplitude (0.2-0.6 mA) and decreased with stimulus frequency (0.1-1 Hz) and were linked to decreased gain of lateral force and reduced lateral force variability as current amplitude and frequency increased, respectively. These results pave the way for uncovering the sensory contributions to the non-perceptual mechanisms regulating balance-correcting motor commands essential for bipedalism and their potential role in balance impairments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".