Vestibular Inputs to Human Motion-Sensitive Visual Cortex

Abstract

Two crucial sources of information available to an organism when moving through an environment are visual and vestibular stimuli. Macaque cortical area MSTd processes visual motion, including cues to self-motion arising from optic flow and also receives information about self-motion from the vestibular system. In humans, whether human MST (hMST) receives vestibular afferents is unknown. We have combined 2 techniques, galvanic vestibular stimulation and functional MRI (fMRI), to show that hMST is strongly activated by vestibular stimulation in darkness, whereas adjacent area MT is unaffected. The activity cannot be explained in terms of somatosensory stimulation at the electrode site. Vestibular input appears to be confined to the anterior portion of hMST, suggesting that hMST as conventionally defined may contain 2 subregions. Vestibular activity was also seen in another area previously implicated in processing visual cues to self-motion, namely the cingulate sulcus visual area (CSv), but not in visual area V6. The results suggest that cross-modal convergence of cues to self-motion occurs in both hMST and CSv.