ArticleProceedings. Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences2019
Gravito-inertial ambiguity resolved through head stabilization.
Article in Proceedings. Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Singular Theory of Sensorimotor Coordination: On Targeted Motions in Space.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Head stabilization during standing in people with persisting symptoms after mild traumatic brain injury.Journal of biomechanics · 2020Article
- Article
- Gravito-inertial ambiguity resolved through head stabilization.Proceedings. Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2019Article
- Vision Does Not Necessarily Stabilize the Head in Space During Continuous Postural Perturbations.Frontiers in neurology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has been frequently observed that humans and animals spontaneously stabilize their heads with respect to the gravitational vertical during body movements even in the absence of vision. The interpretations of this intriguing behaviour have so far not included the need, for survival, to robustly estimate verticality. Here we use a mechanistic model of the head/otolith organ to analyse the possibility for this system to render verticality 'observable', a fundamental prerequisite to the determination of the angular position and acceleration of the head from idiothetic, inertial measurements. The intrinsically nonlinear head-vestibular dynamics is shown to generally lack observability unless the head is stabilized in orientation by feedback. Thus, our study supports the hypothesis that a central function of the physiologically costly head stabilization strategy is to enable an organism to estimate the gravitational vertical and head acceleration during locomotion. Moreover, our result exhibits a rare peculiarity of certain nonlinear systems to fortuitously alter their observability properties when feedback is applied.
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