Irregular primary otolith afferents from the guinea pig utricular and saccular maculae respond to both bone conducted vibration and to air conducted sound

The oVEMP 10 years old – The neural evidence. A reply to Todd “The ‘double dissociation’ is based on a circular logic”

“…The response of these same utricular neurons to ACS showed a broad U-shaped tuning curve for frequencies from 500 Hz to 2000 Hz, similar in bandwidth and average threshold at 750 Hz to that reported by McCue and Guinan for cat saccular afferents (1995). These data confirm and extend the evidence that anatomically identified utricular neurons respond to both ACS and BCV (Curthoys and Vulovic, 2011;Curthoys et al, 2012). Importantly these are not some minor group of neurons, and the threshold stimulus levels for eliciting the ACS response were similar to the values reported by McCue and Guinan (1995).…”

Functional Development of the Vestibular System

“…From a functional point of view, a major difference between the auditory and the vestibular system is that the auditory endorgans are designed to respond to much higher frequencies of stimulation (e.g., 20 Hz to 20 kHz in humans) than the vestibular endorgans. Although vestibular organs can respond to stimulations of up to ∼500 Hz (Curthoys et al, 2012), the frequency range during natural head movements is essentially limited to frequencies of up to 20 Hz in most mammals (Grossman et al, 1988;Beraneck et al, 2008).…”

Clinical Utility of Ocular Vestibular-Evoked Myogenic Potentials (oVEMPs)

“…First, evidence from animal studies suggests that otolith afferents are preferentially activated by sound and vibration [11,12]. Second, patients with vestibular neuritis that appears to selectively affect the superior vestibular nerve typically have absent oVEMPs, suggesting that the reflex depends upon this nerve portion [13][14][15][16].…”