Suppression of visually induced vertigo: effects of attentional position and modality

Visually induced vertigo (VIV) is a serious problem because humans rely on vision more than any other sensory system to receive information from their surrounding environment. We investigated whether attention to simultaneous visual or auditory tasks would reduce VIV.

Subjects were four women and one man who were highly susceptible to VIV and four women who had low susceptibility to VIV. An animation display was prepared to test the effect of overlapping visual task stimuli when the position of the stimuli on the screen was changed. The effect of modality was tested by using an auditory task.

Both the visual and auditory tasks marginally reduced the occurrence of VIV.

Suppression of vertigo did not depend on attentional position or modality and appeared to be related to intentional processing. It is possible that some higher-order mechanism is involved in VIV.