As a prominent illusion, the motion aftereffect (MAE) has traditionally been considered a visual phenomenon. Recent neuroimaging work has revealed increased activities in MT+ and decreased activities in vestibular regions during the MAE, supporting the notion of visual-vestibular interaction on the MAE. Since the head had to remain stationary in fMRI experiments, vestibular self-motion signals were absent in those studies. Accordingly, more direct evidence is still lacking in terms of whether and how vestibular signals modulate the MAE. By developing a virtual reality approach, the present study for the first time demonstrates that horizontal head rotation affects the perceived velocity of the MAE. We found that the MAE was predominantly perceived as moving faster when its direction was opposite to the direction of head rotation than when its direction was the same as head rotation. The magnitude of this effect was positively correlated with the velocity of head rotation. Similar result patterns were not observed for the real motion stimuli. Our findings support a 'cross-modal bias' hypothesis that after living in a multisensory environment long-term the brain develops a strong association between signals from the visual and vestibular pathways. Consequently, weak biasing visual signals in the associated direction can spontaneously emerge with the input of vestibular signals in the multisensory brain areas, substantially modulating the illusory visual motion represented in those areas as well. The hypothesis can also be used to explain other multisensory integration phenomena.

中文翻译：

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旋转人的头部会调节感知到的运动后效速度。

作为一种突出的错觉，运动后效 (MAE) 传统上被认为是一种视觉现象。最近的神经影像学工作揭示了 MAE 期间 MT+ 活动增加和前庭区域活动减少，支持 MAE 上视觉-前庭相互作用的概念。由于在 fMRI 实验中头部必须保持静止，因此在这些研究中没有前庭自运动信号。因此，在前庭信号是否以及如何调节 MAE 方面仍然缺乏更直接的证据。通过开发虚拟现实方法，本研究首次证明水平头部旋转会影响 MAE 的感知速度。我们发现，当 MAE 的方向与头部旋转方向相反时，主要感知到 MAE 移动得比其方向与头部旋转方向相同时更快。这种影响的大小与头部旋转的速度呈正相关。对于真实的运动刺激没有观察到类似的结果模式。我们的研究结果支持“跨模式偏差”假设，即长期生活在多感官环境中后，大脑会在来自视觉和前庭通路的信号之间产生强烈的关联。因此，相关方向上的弱偏置视觉信号可以随着前庭信号在多感觉大脑区域的输入而自发地出现，从而实质上调节这些区域中呈现的幻觉视觉运动。