• Barbara La Scaleia, Francesco Lacquaniti, and Myrka Zago.
• Laboratory of Visuomotor Control and Gravitational Physiology, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, 00179 Rome, Italy. Electronic address: b.lascaleia@hsantalucia.it.
• Neuroscience. 2023 Feb 1; 510: 324832-48.

AbstractNoisy galvanic vestibular stimulation has been shown to improve vestibular perception in healthy subjects. Here, we sought to obtain similar results using more natural stimuli consisting of small-amplitude motion perturbations of the whole body. Thirty participants were asked to report the perceived direction of antero-posterior sinusoidal motion on a MOOG platform. We compared the baseline perceptual thresholds with those obtained by applying small, stochastic perturbations at different power levels along the antero-posterior axis, symmetrically distributed around a zero-mean. At the population level, we found that the thresholds for all but the highest level of noise were significantly lower than the baseline threshold. At the individual level, the threshold was lower with at least one noise level than the threshold without noise in 87% of participants. Thus, small, stochastic oscillations of the whole body can increase the probability of recognizing the direction of motion from low, normally subthreshold vestibular signals, possibly due to stochastic resonance mechanisms. We suggest that, just as the external noise of the present experiments, also the spontaneous random oscillations of the head and body associated with standing posture are beneficial by enhancing vestibular thresholds with a mechanism similar to stochastic resonance.Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

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