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Sex and gender differences have long been a research topic of interest, yet few studies have explored the specific differences in neurological responses between men and women during and after spaceflight. Knowledge in this field is limited due to the significant disproportion of sexes enrolled in the astronaut corps. Research indicates that general neurological and sensory differences exist between the sexes, such as those in laterality of amygdala activity, sensitivity and discrimination in vision processing, and neuronal cell death (apoptosis) pathways. In spaceflight, sex differences may include a higher incidence of entry and space motion sickness and of post-flight vestibular instability in female as opposed to male astronauts who flew on both short- and long-duration missions. Hearing and auditory function in crewmembers shows the expected hearing threshold differences between men and women, in which female astronauts exhibit better hearing thresholds. Longitudinal observations of hearing thresholds for crewmembers yield normal age-related decrements; however, no evidence of sex-related differences from spaceflight has been observed. The impact of sex and gender differences should be studied by making spaceflight accessible and flying more women into space. Only in this way will we know if increasingly longer-duration missions cause significantly different neurophysiological responses in men and women.

Three-dimensional squirrel monkey eye movements were recorded during and immediately following rotation around an earth-vertical yaw axis (160 degrees/s steady state, 100 degrees/s2 acceleration and deceleration). To study interactions between the horizontal angular vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and head orientation, postrotatory VOR alignment was changed relative to gravity by tilting the head out of the horizontal plane (pitch or roll tilt between 15 degrees and 90 degrees) immediately after cessation of motion. Results showed that in addition to post rotatory horizontal nystagmus, vertical nystagmus followed tilts to the left or right (roll), and torsional nystagmus followed forward or backward (pitch) tilts. When the time course and spatial orientation of eye velocity were considered in three dimensions, the axis of eye rotation always shifted toward alignment with gravity, and the postrotatory horizontal VOR decay was accelerated by the tilts. These phenomena may reflect a neural process that resolves the sensory conflict induced by this postrotatory tilt paradigm.

1. Horizontal, vertical, and torsional eye movements were recorded (search coil technique) from five squirrel monkeys during horizontal linear oscillations at 0.5, 1.5, and 5.0 Hz, 0.36 g peak acceleration. Monkeys were positioned to produce linear motion in their nasooccipital (NO), interaural (IA), and dorsoventral (DV) axes. Responses of the linear vestibuloocular reflex (LVOR) were recorded in darkness and in the light with the subjects viewing a head-fixed field 22 or 9.2 cm from the eye. The latter condition provided a measure of "visual suppression" of the LVOR (VSLVOR). Responses were also recorded while monkeys viewed earth-fixed targets, which allowed visual enhancement of the LVOR (VLVOR). Vergence angle was recorded in two monkeys to assess directly the point of binocular fixation in space during linear motion. 2. Two LVOR response types, vertical responses during 0.5-Hz NO-axis translation (NO-vertical) and torsional responses at all frequencies during IA-axis oscillation (IA-torsional) could not be compensatory reflexes for head translation because they either move the eye off target (NO-vertical) or tort the eye relative to the visual world (IA-torsional), thereby degrading visual image stability. 3. Other response types are considered compensatory because they help maintain ocular fixation in space during linear head translation. These include horizontal responses to IA-axis motion (IA-horizontal), vertical responses to DV-axis translation (DV-vertical), and both horizontal and vertical responses to NO-axis oscillation (1.5 and 5 Hz). Observations focus on responses to 5-Hz oscillations, in which visual inputs are essentially ineffective in modifying the LVOR. 4. The kinematics of perfect ocular compensation during head translation indicate that the ideal ocular response is governed by the motion of the eye relative to target position. Relevant variables include target distance, which is crucial for all axes of motion, and target eccentricity, which is important only for head motion roughly parallel to the target (NO-axis translation). Findings are compatible with predictions based on ideal kinematics. However, it is the point of binocular fixation in space, not actual target position, that governs LVOR behavior. 5. The IA-horizontal and DV-vertical LVOR is in response to head motion roughly orthogonal to the line of sight. Responses under all stimulus conditions (LVOR, VSLVOR, and VLVOR) behaved similarly at 5 Hz, and were modulated linearly with vergence [in meter angles (MA), the reciprocal of binocular fixation distance].(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

The interaction of angular and linear stimuli produces a complex alignment of spatial orientation and the VOR. This phenomenon was studied by measuring three dimensional eye movements in 6 squirrel monkeys during centrifugation in the dark. The axis of eye rotation was always aligned with gravity and with the spinal axis of the upright monkeys. The erect monkeys were oriented such that they were either facing toward the direction of motion or were facing away from the motion. Angular velocity trapezoids were utilized as the motion stimuli with a ramp acceleration of 10 degrees/s2 to a constant velocity of 200 degrees/s. This yields a final centripetal acceleration of 1 g. The orientation of centripetal acceleration dramatically altered the VOR by changing the axis of eye rotation, the peak value of slow phase eye velocity, and the time constant of per-rotary decay. The axis of eye rotation always tended to align with gravito-inertial force, the peak value of slow phase eye velocity was greater when the monkey faced the motion than when it faced away from the motion, and the time constant of decay was smaller when the monkey faced the motion than when it faced away from the motion. These findings were statistically significant (p less than 0.05) and were consistent across all monkeys. The data also indicate that the VOR may be separated into two reflexes, a linear reflex and a rotational reflex. The linear reflex decays as the axis of eye rotation aligns with gravito-inertial force (GIF). These results indicate that GIF is resolved into two components: one representing an internal estimate of linear acceleration and one representing an internal estimate of gravity.

Experiments were performed while monkeys flew in space in the ‘‘Cosmos/ Bion’’ Missions to determine the effect of microgravity on the oculomotor and vestibular systems. Eye-head coordination during gaze shifts to lateral targets (gaze fixation reaction, GFR) and multiunit activity in the medial vestibular nuclei (MVN) and cerebellar flocculus were studied in rhesus monkeys in the Bion 6 (Cosmos 1514) through Bion 11 projects. In the first few days of space flight, gaze displacement onto lateral targets became hypermetric, and the amplitude of head movements decreased. This was compensated for by 112

The timing, molecular basis, and morphophysiological and behavioral consequences of the interaction between external environment and the internal genetic pool that shapes the nervous system over a lifetime remain important questions in basic neuroscientific research. Space station offers the opportunity to study this interaction over several life cycles in a variety of organisms. This short review considers past work in altered gravity, particularly on the vestibular system, as the basis for proposing future research on space station, and discusses the equipment necessary to achieve goals. It is stressed that, in keeping with the international investment being made in this research endeavor, both the questions asked and the technologies to be developed should be bold. Advantage must be taken of this unique research environment to expand the frontiers of neuroscience.

A basic goal of neurocomputing is to identify, from biological neural nets, the mathematics intrinsic to neural net function. This is not only a basic research goal — but fundamental to electronic implementation to neurocomputers. To experimentally measure neural geometry, from up to ten cerebellar Purkinje cells of locomotory cats, multi-electrode recordings were obtained and the metric tensors of the functional manifold were calculated. The covariant metric tensor was calculated by cross-correlation analysis and the contravariant metric tensor was obtained by its Moore-Penrose inverse. For analysis of massively parallel data, a transputer-based neurocomputer was built. Results demonstrate the non-Euclidean geometry intrinsic to neural nets and its modifiability with learning.

Linear vestibuloocular reflexes (LVORs) stabilize retinal images by producing eye movements to compensate for linear head motion. LVOR response characteristics depend upon gaze relative to the motion axis and binocular fixation distance. LVOR sensitivity during NO-axis motion increases as gaze eccentricity relative to the motion axis increases and as binocular fixation distance decreases. To fixate targets during forward head motion and rightward gaze, eyes must move to the right, but when looking left, the eyes must move to the left. In this study, LVORs were measured (binocular search coils) during 5.0 Hz horizontal motion along axes between and including NO and IA. This reorients head and otolith inputs relative to linear motion. We found that LVORs follow the same kinematics regardless of eye position in the head or head orientation relative to motion. Eye position information must be quickly and accurately integrated with otolith inputs to determine eye position (gaze) relative to linear head motion in space. The LVOR provides a behaviorally useful reflex for maintaining ocular fixation on visual targets during translation along any axis.

1. The purpose of this study was to quantify the response characteristics of eye movements produced by linear head oscillations in the dark (the linear vestibuloocular reflex, or LVOR). Horizontal, vertical, and torsional eye movements were measured in adult squirrel monkeys by the use of a dual scleral search-coil technique during linear oscillations (0.5, 1.5, and 5.0 Hz, 0.36 g peak acceleration) along the animals' interaural (IA), dorsoventral (DV), and nasooccipital (NO) axes. 2. Two LVOR responses, horizontal eye movements during IA-axis translation and vertical eye movements during DV-axis motion, were in a compensatory direction for head translation. Response amplitudes increased as frequency increased, whereas phase typically showed a lead. 3. Two other LVORs, torsional responses during IA-axis translation (all frequencies) and vertical responses during NO-axis oscillations (0.5 Hz), behaved differently. These two LVORs cannot be functionally compensatory for head translation because they degrade fixation on targets, and therefore image stability, by rotating the eyes off target (NO-vertical) or torting the eyes relative to the visual world (IA-torsional). Responses to NO-axis motion at frequencies greater than 0.5 Hz depended on initial eye position and fixation distance and are described in the companion paper. 4. The effect of head orientation on the LVOR was assessed by testing four head positions in 90 degrees steps around the axis of head motion for each of the three axes of translation. This was done, first, to determine whether the LVORs are responses to the "swinging vector" of gravitoinertial force during linear head motion or to head translation; and second, to quantify potential effects of static head (otolith) orientation on the LVORs. Results showed no systematic effects of head orientation on LVOR responses in the frequency bandwidth studied. This indicates that the LVORs are dependent on the direction of linear motion relative to the head (and otolith organs) but not on the swinging vector of gravitoinertial force, and that the LVORs are uninfluenced by static orientation of the head and reloading of the otoliths.

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the vestibular head- eye coordination—a geometrical sensorimotor neurocomputer paradigm. Vestibulo-cerebellum attains an outstandingly high proportion of the brain in birds. Accordingly, they are masters of flying; rapidly changing their body-shape to adapt to turbulent conditions. Flight is controlled by an “on-board, real­time” neurocomputer that relies on an error-tolerant, gracefully degrading, massively parallel and therefore, fast neural network. Also, it need not rely on supercomplex software that characterizes, and causes most of the breakdowns, of present-day serial computer systems. The vestibulo-cerebellum is an integral part of gaze-stabilization systems, such as those which generate eye-movements and head-movements that compensate for displacements of the body and thus, ensure a steady gaze. Also, the pursuit and saccadic eye movement system provides the fastest and most precise biological example of target-tracking and interception. The approach of generalized coordinates intrinsic to central nervous system (CNS) function requires an anatomical data-base.

1. The relation between discharge frequency and angular head position was determined for a population of regularly discharging single first-order vestibular neurones in the eighth nerve of the barbiturate anaesthetized cat. 2. Each axon had a characteristic head position which was maximally excitatory to it, and a diametrically opposed head position which was minimally excitatory. 3. After correction for phase shifts introduced by the orientation of preferred excitability, discharge rate in statoreceptor afferents varied as a power function of the sine of angular head position with exponents ranging from 0·9 to 1·6. 4. Experimentally determined discharge rates were compared with the predictions of a computer simulation model incorporating the idea that shearing force acting on morphologically polarized receptors is the adequate stimulus for macular receptor cells. 5. This approach permitted the identification of a population of first-order vestibular afferents whose discharge frequency varied with head position as did the magnitude of shear force computed for individual receptors, each most excited in a particular head position. 6. The majority of the spatial orientations of maximal sensitivity defined a surface which is tilted by approximately 30° with reference to the Horsley—Clarke horizontal plane, implying that most statoreceptor afferents are maximally sensitive to position changes when the cat's head is at or near its normal position.