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control during walking situation.
According to the experiments, three main findings
are resulted in this paper: 1) space perception between
blindness and sighted people differs. Especially, con-
genital blindness people have a keen space perception
from the auditory cues used as the guide for the walk-
ing direction. 2) Patterns of sound pan as the acoustic
cues induce different body balance control behaviors
in the aspects of response speed and rotation amount
of body. The sudden change of the sound pan in-
duced fast and large balance control. Finally 3) vision
of sighted or acquired blindness people is combined
to control their body balance. They had performed
faster to response against the acoustic cues without
eye mask than invalidating the vision with eye mask.
In the next section, we introduce the advanced re-
search results related to our experiments. Section 3
will explain the methods of our experiments and pro-
pose hypotheses expected from the experiments. Sec-
tion 4 will explain the results of the experiments and
will show proofs for our hypothesizes. Finally we will
discuss the experimental results, the findings and will
conclude this paper.
2 RELATED WORKS
The relationship between acoustic cue and body bal-
ance control has been investigated since 1970’s.
The early investigations were related to the
auditory-induced illusion (Lackner, 1977)(Lackner,
1978)(Lackner, 1983). It is well known experiments
using rotating sound source with 10-20Hz sound pan
change of each speaker. Sitting in the environment,
the participant can percept that either ”I am moving”
or ”Surround is moving”. Extending the illusory
phenomenon, researchers investigate the posture
perception with multiple rotating sound sources.
Following the rotating direction of the sound, the
participant percepts illusory posture movement
(actually posture does not change).
On the other hand, the clinical approach reports
an experiment that gives electrical stimuli to vestibu-
lar organ of the human participants. It results that the
stimuli absolutely affects to his/her body balance con-
trol (Aoki et al., 2000). It is now very hard to perform
the experiment with the vestibular stimuli due to the
ethical problems. Therefore, clinically the participant
is a patient who is in hospital to aid auditory-related
diseases.
When we consider applications of the vection or
the vestibular stimuli, the biofeedback application is
one of the interesting directions for attractive utiliza-
tions. The biofeedback is a trend word used in the
application area of the auditory-induced body bal-
ance control. For example, (Dozza et al., 2006), (Gi-
ansanti et al., 2009) and (Brunelli et al., 2006) have
reported the body balance control using a feedback
system to keep a vertical standing posture. We think
these research projects are going to the frontline of
the research regarding auditory cues with sound pan
changes that affect the right and the left bias of pos-
ture. The research is focused on the static posture
control with the healthy sighted, the blindness, and
some Parkinson’s disease participants. However, we
are going to focus on the body balance control against
auditory cues of the blindness and the sighted people
under a walking situation. Under such an active en-
vironment, the mechanisms of the auditory-induced
body balance control has not been clearly explained in
the previous researches because the experiments had
been focused on illusions occurred at a static posture.
Regarding the Parkinson’s patients, a biofeedback
system called Walkmate has been developed by the
researches (Miyake, 2009) (Hove et al., 2012). The
Walkmate generates rhythmic pacing sequences to the
Parkinson patients using nonlinear limit cycle oscil-
lators. The rhythmic pacing timings are generated
by feedforwarded the timings taken from a pressure
sensor put in the patient’s foot. The system induces
self-walking from the potential characteristics of the
disease. Therefore, this type of application using au-
ditory cues during active body balance control can be
treated as one of special cases. Therefore, we want to
try to find how the auditory and the body balance con-
trol of physically healthy persons are involved during
active movements like walking.
As we discussed above, it is not well-known that
the cognitive response from vection to the body bal-
ance regardingphysically healthy people. The vection
is recognized as an internal psychological and cogni-
tive perception. Therefore, the body balance might be
influenced by the vection in a dynamic body balance
control such as during walking, running or hard sports
activity. However, the research regarding the vection
is still under progress in the static body balance con-
trol or self-cognitive issue due to the complex rela-
tion to the sight. Thus, although the space perception
of human in a dynamic body balance control would
be related to the vection and the vision, it is not ex-
plored that the dynamic body balance control relates
to the auditory stimuli. Finally the new findings will
be utilized in sports trainings, new society design to
eliminate dangerousness induced by acoustic illusion,
and engineering applications such as a novel rehabili-
tation system using a sound guide.
In this paper, we focus on exploring influences
to the space perception regarding the dynamic body
SpacePerceptionbyAcousticCuesInfluencesAuditory-inducedBodyBalanceControl
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