Objective-We examined motion sickness in an oscillating virtual environment presented via a video projector system.Background-Visible oscillation of the physical environment is known to induce both postural instability and motion sickness, but it cannot be assumed that the same phenomena will occur in a virtual simulation of such motion.

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In mild seas, variations in stance width modulate standing posture and influence the performance of computer-based visual tasks.

Cognitive performance exhibits patterns of trial-to-trial variation that can be described as 1/f or pink noise, as do repeated measures of locomotor performance. Although cognitive and locomotor performances are known to interact when performed concurrently, it is not known whether concurrent performance affects the tasks' pink noise dynamical structure. In this study, participants performed a cognitive task (repeatedly producing a temporal interval) and a motor task (walking on a treadmill) in single- and dual-task conditions. In single-task conditions both tasks exhibited pink noise structure. For concurrent performance the dynamical structure of the cognitive task changed reliably in the direction of white (random) noise. The dynamical structure of locomotion remained pink noise. The change in cognitive dynamics occurred despite no reliable changes in mean or standard deviation measures for either task. The results suggest a functional reorganization of cognitive dynamics supporting successful task performance in dual-task conditions.

When two standing people converse with each other there is an increase in their shared postural activity, relative to conversation with different partners. We asked pairs of participants to converse with each other or with experimental confederates while standing on rigid and nonrigid surfaces. On the rigid surface, shared postural activity was greater when participants conversed with each other than when they conversed with confederates. In addition, the strength of interpersonal coupling increased across trials, but only when members of a dyad conversed with each other. On the nonrigid surface, postural sway variability increased, but we found no evidence that shared postural activity was different when participants conversed with each other, as opposed to conversing with confederates. We consider several possible interpretations of these results.