The awareness of body orientation modulates the perception of visual vertical

Abstract

It is established that the body position influences verticality perception. In contrast, the possible influence of the awareness of the body orientation on verticality perception has never been investigated. This hypothesis, explored in the present study, is supported by the role played by the parietal cortex and the insula in both body position awareness and verticality perception.Nine subjects were asked to estimate the direction of the visual vertical (VV) by 12 adjustments of a luminous line in three conditions: (1) a control condition (subjects were upright and aware of their position), (2) a condition of congruence between the lateral body tilt and the awareness of this tilt, and (3) a condition of dissociation of subjective and objective orientations (tilted subjects who felt upright). The dissociation between objective and subjective orientations was obtained by inducing experimentally a postural vertical (PV) bias through 5min of lateral body tilt at 30° in darkness in a motorized flight simulator (mean 8.8°±4; min 6.2°; max 17.4°). VV orientation and variability were measured (expressed below in this order).As compared to the upright condition (0.3°±0.2; 0.8°±0.5), subjects showed similar VV orientation (0.1°±0.6; p=0.82) but an increased variability (1.4°±0.5; p<0.001) when tilted and aware of their tilt. In contrast, when they were tilted but felt upright, VV was biased in the direction of body tilt (2°±0.5; p<0.005) without increase of variability (0.9°±0.5; p=0.7).Our study reveals that the awareness of body orientation modulates verticality representation, which means that in addition to sensory integration, mental processes play also a role in the sense of verticality. We propose a novel model of verticality representation, based both on bottom-up and top-down processes.