Common causation and offset effects in human visual-inertial heading direction integration

Movement direction can be determined from a combination of visual and inertial cues. Visual motion (optic flow) can represent self-motion through a fixed environment or environmental motion relative to an observer. Simultaneous visual and inertial heading cues present the question of whether the cues have a common cause (i.e., should be integrated) or whether they should be considered independent. This was studied in eight healthy human subjects who experienced 12 visual and inertial headings in the horizontal plane divided in 30 degrees increments. The headings were estimated in two unisensory and six multisensory trial blocks. Each unisensory block included 72 stimulus presentations, while each multisensory block included 144 stimulus presentations, including every possible combination of visual and inertial headings in random order. After each multisensory stimulus, subjects reported their perception of visual and inertial headings as congruous (i.e., having common causation) or not. In the multisensory trial blocks, subjects also reported visual or inertial heading direction (3 trial blocks for each). For aligned visual-inertial headings, the rate of common causation was higher during alignment in cardinal than noncardinal directions. When visual and inertial stimuli were separated by 30 degrees, the rate of reported common causation remained >50%, but it decreased to 15% or less for separation of >90 degrees. The inertial heading was biased toward the visual heading by 11-20 degrees for separations of 30-120 degrees. Thus there was sensory integration even in conditions without reported common causation. The visual heading was minimally influenced by inertial direction. When trials with common causation perception were compared with those without, inertial heading perception had a stronger bias toward visual stimulus direction. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Optic flow ambiguously represents self-motion or environmental motion. When these are in different directions, it is uncertain whether these are integrated into a common perception or not. This study looks at that issue by determining whether the two modalities are consistent and by measuring their perceived directions to get a degree of influence. The visual stimulus can have significant influence on the inertial stimulus even when they are perceived as inconsistent.