Vector Encoding and the Vestibular Foundations of Spatial Cognition:Neurophysiological and Computational Mechanisms

摘要

Recent neurophysiological and behavioral studies suggest that the influence ofthe vestibular system on spatial orientation runs far deeper than its well-known role in the perception of attitude and motion and in the stabilization of visual images. The vestibular system also appears to play a central role in establishing the fundamental directional reference framework that is used to construct cognitive representations of the environment and to compute optimal trajectories to remembered locations on the basis of visual landmarks. This so-called sense of direction appears to involve the integration of angular velocity signals that arise primarily in the vestibular system. The integration process seems to be implemented without an appreciable time constant (leak) and is automatically reset every 36O deg, which leads to the suggestion that the integration may actually be implemented by linear associative mapping, an operation that is at least theoretically easy to implement with real or artificial neural networks.