Definition
The peripheral vestibular system comprises ten three-dimensional inertial motion sensors, five in each inner ear. They are mirrored pairs; the four otoliths (utricle and saccule) sense the linear acceleration and position of the head in space, and the six semicircular canals (Fig. 1) sense angular acceleration of the head. It is an ancient system even present in some invertebrates (Carey and Della Santina 2010; Baloh and Kerber 2011; Goldberg et al. 2012).
Labyrinth. Showing the orientation of the semicircular canals in the human
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References
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Halmagyi, G.M., Curthoys, I.S. (2015). Vestibular System, Introduction. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_100654-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_100654-1
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