Abstract
It has been demonstrated that chronic exposure to certain visual environments, for example those generated by magnifying lenses and reversing prisms, alter the gain and phase of the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) in the dark in numerous species. Most experiments concerning such modification of the VOR have used semicircular canal stimulation. So far, there has been no investigation of the effect of adaptive plasticity of the semicircular canal-ocular reflex (SCOR) to an off-vertical axis rotation (OVAR), a dynamic otolith stimulation. The purposes of this study are to study physiologic alteration of the VOR using otolithic stimulation and to determine whether the bias and modulation component during OVAR change following adaptation of the SCOR. In this study, using OVAR, we tested the hypothesis that the otolith-ocular reflex (OOR) is altered by changes in the SCOR. Our study showed no convincing evidence for a transfer of SCOR adaptation to OOR using OVAR. There are two possibilities that could explain why we are unable to obtain this evidence, either there is no transfer to OOR, or there is an undiscovered technical problem. Future studies of transfer of adaptation will decrease OVAR exposure and assess OOR variability.
