Sensory cortical prostheses have the potential to aid people suffering from blindness, deafness or other sensory deficits by applying stimulation directly to the brain. Our main objective was to investigate if rats were able to perform tactile discrimination based on a natural, tactile input or based on artificially generated sensation. Four rats were first trained to touch a spinning wheel and...

Related experiments examined the effects of attenuated prenatal sensory stimulation on subsequent postnatal auditory and visual responsiveness in precocial bobwhite quail chicks {Colinus virginianus). Results revealed that denying quail embryos the prenatal vestibular and tactile stimulation provided by broodmates during incubation alters preand postnatal perceptual functioning. Chicks incubate...

Research has shown that a variety of different sensory manipulations, including visual illusions, transcutaneous nerve stimulation, vestibular caloric stimulation, optokinetic stimulation, and prism adaptation, can all influence people's performance on spatial tasks such as line bisection. It has been suggested that these manipulations may act upon the 'higher-order' levels of representation us...

It has been shown that sinusoidal galvanic vestibular stimulation (sGVS) has no effect on the firing of spontaneously active muscle spindles in either relaxed or voluntarily contracting human leg muscles. However, all previous studies have been conducted on subjects in a seated position. Given that independent vestibular control of muscle spindle firing would be more valuable during postural th...

HYPOTHESIS That disease or dysfunction of vestibular end organs in human patients will reduce or eliminate the contribution of the affected end organs to the total eye-movement response to DC surface galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS). BACKGROUND It was assumed that DC GVS (at current of 5 mA) stimulates all vestibular end organs, an assumption that is strongly supported by physiological e...

Peripheral vestibular organs feed the central nervous system with inputs favoring the correct perception of space during head and body motion. Applying temporal order judgments (TOJs) to pairs of simultaneous or asynchronous stimuli presented in the left and right egocentric space, we evaluated the influence of leftward and rightward vestibular rotatory accelerations given around the vertical h...

The cortical processing of vestibular information is not hierarchically organized as the processing of signals in the visual and auditory modalities. Anatomic and electrophysiological studies in the monkey revealed the existence of multiple interconnected areas in which vestibular signals converge with visual and/or somatosensory inputs. Although recent functional imaging studies using caloric ...

The electro-tactile display with localized high-speed switching is a novel type of electro-tactile display based on H-Bridge circuit that uses only one electrical source at a time. By using this display electrical stimulations can easily be presented and measured simultaneously. In this paper, other new methods for electrical stimulation, including scan-type ectrical stimulation and dipole elec...