Envelope statistics of self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities: Implications for vestibular processing.

There is accumulating evidence that the brain's neural coding strategies are constrained by natural stimulus statistics. Here we investigated the statistics of the time varying envelope (i.e. a second-order stimulus attribute that is related to variance) of rotational and translational self-mot...

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Main Authors: Jérome Carriot, Mohsen Jamali, Kathleen E Cullen, Maurice J Chacron
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2017-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5456318?pdf=render
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author Jérome Carriot
Mohsen Jamali
Kathleen E Cullen
Maurice J Chacron
author_facet Jérome Carriot
Mohsen Jamali
Kathleen E Cullen
Maurice J Chacron
author_sort Jérome Carriot
collection DOAJ
description There is accumulating evidence that the brain's neural coding strategies are constrained by natural stimulus statistics. Here we investigated the statistics of the time varying envelope (i.e. a second-order stimulus attribute that is related to variance) of rotational and translational self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities. We found that envelopes can reach large values across all six motion dimensions (~450 deg/s for rotations and ~4 G for translations). Unlike results obtained in other sensory modalities, the spectral power of envelope signals decreased slowly for low (< 2 Hz) and more sharply for high (>2 Hz) temporal frequencies and thus was not well-fit by a power law. We next compared the spectral properties of envelope signals resulting from active and passive self-motion, as well as those resulting from signals obtained when the subject is absent (i.e. external stimuli). Our data suggest that different mechanisms underlie deviation from scale invariance in rotational and translational self-motion envelopes. Specifically, active self-motion and filtering by the human body cause deviation from scale invariance primarily for translational and rotational envelope signals, respectively. Finally, we used well-established models in order to predict the responses of peripheral vestibular afferents to natural envelope stimuli. We found that irregular afferents responded more strongly to envelopes than their regular counterparts. Our findings have important consequences for understanding the coding strategies used by the vestibular system to process natural second-order self-motion signals.
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spelling doaj.art-97fa64150ddd434baaa28ac777c0c8522022-12-21T18:37:15ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032017-01-01126e017866410.1371/journal.pone.0178664Envelope statistics of self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities: Implications for vestibular processing.Jérome CarriotMohsen JamaliKathleen E CullenMaurice J ChacronThere is accumulating evidence that the brain's neural coding strategies are constrained by natural stimulus statistics. Here we investigated the statistics of the time varying envelope (i.e. a second-order stimulus attribute that is related to variance) of rotational and translational self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities. We found that envelopes can reach large values across all six motion dimensions (~450 deg/s for rotations and ~4 G for translations). Unlike results obtained in other sensory modalities, the spectral power of envelope signals decreased slowly for low (< 2 Hz) and more sharply for high (>2 Hz) temporal frequencies and thus was not well-fit by a power law. We next compared the spectral properties of envelope signals resulting from active and passive self-motion, as well as those resulting from signals obtained when the subject is absent (i.e. external stimuli). Our data suggest that different mechanisms underlie deviation from scale invariance in rotational and translational self-motion envelopes. Specifically, active self-motion and filtering by the human body cause deviation from scale invariance primarily for translational and rotational envelope signals, respectively. Finally, we used well-established models in order to predict the responses of peripheral vestibular afferents to natural envelope stimuli. We found that irregular afferents responded more strongly to envelopes than their regular counterparts. Our findings have important consequences for understanding the coding strategies used by the vestibular system to process natural second-order self-motion signals.http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5456318?pdf=render
spellingShingle Jérome Carriot
Mohsen Jamali
Kathleen E Cullen
Maurice J Chacron
Envelope statistics of self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities: Implications for vestibular processing.
PLoS ONE
title Envelope statistics of self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities: Implications for vestibular processing.
title_full Envelope statistics of self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities: Implications for vestibular processing.
title_fullStr Envelope statistics of self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities: Implications for vestibular processing.
title_full_unstemmed Envelope statistics of self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities: Implications for vestibular processing.
title_short Envelope statistics of self-motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities: Implications for vestibular processing.
title_sort envelope statistics of self motion signals experienced by human subjects during everyday activities implications for vestibular processing
url http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5456318?pdf=render
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