[Information transfer in the human perception of body position in space during lateral tilt (author's transl)].

(1) With eight human subjects, the perception of position in space during lateral tilt was studied by a method of absolute judgement. A preliminary analysis showed that each subject required 1000 stimuli, with 36 stimulus categories, to attain statisticach subject required 1000 stimuli, with 36 stimulus categories, to attain statistical significance. (2) Since it would be hard to experiment with such long durations, normalized experiments were pooled. The average information transfer was 3.0 bit/stimulus. (3) A closer look at the information transmission in various portions of the stimulus-response relationship (partial information transfer) revealed that near the vertical, with the head uppermost, there is more information transmission than in all other positions. This is in contrast to the visual perception of line orientation. (4) The stimulus-response relationship shows a small nonlinearity. Deviations of the body position from the vertical, with the head down, are underestimated up to 70 degrees away from the vertical; deviations from the vertical with the head uppermost are underestimated up to 10 degrees away from the vertical but overestimated up to 70 degrees.