Affiliations: [a] The Rockefeller University, New York, New York | [b] Oregon Hearing Research Center, Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, Oregon | [c] Department of Physiology, Hokkaido University School of Medicine, Sapporo, Japan | [d] Department of Physiology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada | [e] Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Tokyo, Japan | [f] Department of Physiology, Tokyo Medical Coliege, Tokyo, Japan
Note: [*] Reprint address: Dr. V. J. Wilson, The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York, NY 10021.
Abstract: Stabilization of the head is required not only for adequate motor performance, such as maintaining balance while standing or walking, but also for the adequate reception of sensory inputs such as visual and auditory information. The vestibular organs, which consist of three approximately orthogonal semicircular canals (anterior, horizontal, posterior) and two otolith organs (utriculus, sacculus), provide the most important input for the detection of head movement. Activation of afferents from these receptors evokes the vestibulocollic reflex (VCR), which stabilizes bead position in space. In this review, which is the outgrowth of a session of the vestibular symposium held in Hawaii in April, 1994, we discuss the neural substrate of this reflex and some aspects of the central processing involved in its production. Some topics are not considered, in particular the important interaction between the VCR and the cervicocollic reflex evoked by activation of neck afferents (70,119), and attempts to model the reflex (69).
