Ocular versus extraocular control of posture and equilibrium

Abstract

Vision has been shown for almost a century to be heavily involved in postural control. However, the mechanism by which it operates is still an open debate. The purpose of this manuscript is to review the evidence supporting the view that there are two modes of visual detection of body sway: ocular and extraocular. The former is based on the characteristics of the visual flow (retinal slip), the second one is based on either the copy of the motor command (efference copy) or the extraocular muscle afferents (re-afferences) consecutive to eye movements. Results from the literature indicate that these two modes of visual detection of body sway are effective and can operate congruently. For sufficiently large body sway with respect to eye-target distance, the ocular and the extraocular perception systems could provide two sources of visual information about body displacements. However, the afferent system might remain the only one used for small lateral body sway.