[From vestibular nystagmus to the transfer function of the vestibulo-ocular reflex]

A new method for the separation of the two phases of the vestibular nystagmus (slow eye velocity and fast eye velocity) is presented. The aim is to calculate the transfer coefficients of the human vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR). With a combination of thresholds on the eye velocity and the eye acceleration signals, the different phases of fast eye velocity in the vestibular nystagmus can be located with a good accuracy. So this phases which are not of vestibular origin can be eliminated. The dependence of the transfer function and of the coherence function from the values of the thresholds is studied. This study shows that our method is very robust and that the consequence of the systematic errors occurring with the preceding methods, we have used, is a bad estimation of the gain of the VOR. The values of the coherence function we obtained show that the VOR has a linear behaviour within the range of frequencies we studied (0.01-0.5 Hz).