Bury Nils-Alexander, Jenkin Michael, Allison Robert S, Herpers Rainer, Harris Laurence R
Institute of Visual Computing, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Grantham-Allee 20, 53757, St. Augustin, Germany.
Centre for Vision Research, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada.
NPJ Microgravity. 2023 Jun 10;9(1):42. doi: 10.1038/s41526-023-00282-3.
Neutral buoyancy has been used as an analog for microgravity from the earliest days of human spaceflight. Compared to other options on Earth, neutral buoyancy is relatively inexpensive and presents little danger to astronauts while simulating some aspects of microgravity. Neutral buoyancy removes somatosensory cues to the direction of gravity but leaves vestibular cues intact. Removal of both somatosensory and direction of gravity cues while floating in microgravity or using virtual reality to establish conflicts between them has been shown to affect the perception of distance traveled in response to visual motion (vection) and the perception of distance. Does removal of somatosensory cues alone by neutral buoyancy similarly impact these perceptions? During neutral buoyancy we found no significant difference in either perceived distance traveled nor perceived size relative to Earth-normal conditions. This contrasts with differences in linear vection reported between short- and long-duration microgravity and Earth-normal conditions. These results indicate that neutral buoyancy is not an effective analog for microgravity for these perceptual effects.
自人类太空飞行早期以来,中性浮力就一直被用作微重力的模拟环境。与地球上的其他选择相比,中性浮力相对便宜,并且在模拟微重力的某些方面时对宇航员几乎没有危险。中性浮力消除了重力方向的体感线索,但保留了前庭线索。在微重力环境中漂浮或使用虚拟现实来制造两者之间的冲突时,同时消除体感和重力方向线索已被证明会影响对视觉运动(平移)响应的行进距离感知和距离感知。仅通过中性浮力消除体感线索是否同样会影响这些感知呢?在中性浮力环境下,我们发现与地球正常条件相比,在感知的行进距离或感知大小方面均无显著差异。这与短期和长期微重力与地球正常条件之间报告的线性平移差异形成对比。这些结果表明,对于这些感知效应而言,中性浮力并非微重力的有效模拟环境。