title: Acute peripheral vestibular deficit increases redundancy in random number generation.
abstract: Unilateral peripheral vestibular deficit leads to broad cognitive difficulties and biases in spatial orientation. More specifically, vestibular patients typically show a spatial bias toward their affected ear in the subjective visual vertical, head and trunk orientation, fall tendency, and walking trajectory. By means of a random number generation task, we set out to investigate how an acute peripheral vestibular deficit affects the mental representation of numbers in space. Furthermore, the random number generation task allowed us to test if patients with peripheral vestibular deficit show evidence of impaired executive functions while keeping the head straight and while performing active head turns. Previous research using galvanic vestibular stimulation in healthy people has shown no effects on number space, but revealed increased redundancy of the generated numbers. Other studies reported a spatial bias in number representation during active and passive head turns. In this experiment, we tested 43 patients with acute vestibular neuritis (18 patients with left-sided and 25 with right-sided vestibular deficit) and 28 age-matched healthy controls. We found no bias in number space in patients with peripheral vestibular deficit but showed increased redundancy in patients during active head turns. Patients showed worse performance in generating sequences of random numbers, which indicates a deficit in the updating component of executive functions. We argue that RNG is a promising candidate for a time- and cost-effective assessment of executive functions in patients suffering from a peripheral vestibular deficit.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, Bern, 3012, Switzerland. ivan.moser@psy.unibe.ch.|Center for Cognition, Learning and Memory, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, Bern, 3012, Switzerland. ivan.moser@psy.unibe.ch.
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2139-2421
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Moser
authors.affiliation: Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Inselspital, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Dominique
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Vibert
authors.affiliation: Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Inselspital, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Marco D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Caversaccio
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, Bern, 3012, Switzerland.|Center for Cognition, Learning and Memory, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, Bern, 3012, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Fred W
authors.initials: FW
authors.lastname: Mast
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D018450:Disease Progression; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D010468:Perceptual Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D019956:Stereotypic Movement Disorder / Q000209:etiology; D015837:Vestibular Diseases / Q000150:complications*; D058585:Vestibular Evoked Myogenic Potentials / Q000502:physiology
keywords: Executive functions; Numerical cognition; Random number generation; Spatial attention; Vestibular deficit