Effects of ‘tone-in-noise’ Moving Visual Scenes on Postural Sway

The use of moving visual scenes to evoke postural responses is a practical method of experimentally examining the sensory integration processes related to posture, as it provides a means of manipulating visual input in a controlled fashion. This approach has been utilized to investigate postural phenomena such as sensory conflict (Kuo et al. 1998) and sensory reweighting (Peterka, R. 2002), as well as adaptation – which is a transient decrease in postural sway that has been observed in subjects exposed to periodic moving visual scenes (Loughlin et al, 1996). Evidence of adaptive behavior in response to periodic inputs suggests that predictive mechanisms may exist in the postural control loop. A useful next step would be to determine if non-periodic inputs elicit similar adaptive behavior. As such, the purpose of this study is to experimentally examine the effect of ‘tone-in-noise’ moving visual scenes on postural sway adaptation.