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Summary: INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING JOURNAL OF NEURAL ENGINEERING
J. Neural Eng. 2 (2005) S164S179 doi:10.1088/1741-2560/2/3/S02
Sensory vestibular contributions to
constructing internal models of
self-motion
Andrea M Green, Aasef G Shaikh and Dora E Angelaki
Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Washington University School of Medicine,
660 South Euclid Avenue, Box 8108, St Louis, MO, 63110, USA
Received 12 February 2005
Accepted for publication 28 June 2005
Published 31 August 2005
Online at stacks.iop.org/JNE/2/S164
Abstract
The ability to navigate in the world and execute appropriate behavioral and motor responses
depends critically on our capacity to construct an accurate internal representation of our
current motion and orientation in space. Vestibular sensory signals are among those that may
make an essential contribution to the construction of such `internal models'. Movement in a
gravitational environment represents a situation where the construction of internal models
becomes particularly important because the otolith organs, like any linear accelerometer, sense
inertial and gravitational accelerations equivalently. Otolith afferents thus provide inherently
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