The vestibulocollic reflex

Stabilization of the head is required not only for adequate motor performance, such as maintaining balance while standing or walking, but also for the adequate reception of sensory inputs such as visual and auditory information. The vestibular organs, which consist of three approximately orthogonal semicircular canals (anterior, horizontal, posterior) and two otolith organs (utriculus, sacculus), provide the most important input for the detection of head movement. Activation of afferents from these receptors evokes the vestibulocollic reflex (VCR), which stabilizes head position in space. In this review, which is the outgrowth of a session of the vestibular symposium held in Hawaii in April, 1994, we discuss the neural substrate of this reflex and some aspects of the central processing involved in its production. Some topics are not considered, in particular the important interaction between the VCR and the cervicocollic reflex evoked by activation of neck afferents (70,119), and attempts to model the reflex (69).