Core Body Temperature Effects on the Mouse Vestibulo-ocular Reflex

Core body temperature has been shown to affect vestibular end-organ and nerve afferents so that their resting discharge rate and sensitivity increase with temperature. Our aim was to determine whether these changes observed in extracellular nerve recordings of anaesthetized C57BL/6 mice corresponded to changes in the behavioural vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) of alert mice. The VOR drives eye rotations to keep images stable on the retina during head movements. We measured the VOR gain (eye velocity/head velocity) and phase (delay between vestibular stimulus and response) during whole-body sinusoidal rotations ranging 0.5–12 Hz with peak velocity 50 or 100 °/s in nine adult C57BL/6 mice. We also measured the VOR during whole-body transient rotations with acceleration 3000 or 6000 °/s² reaching a plateau of 150 or 300 °/s. These measures were obtained while the mouse’s core body temperature was held at either 32 or 37 °C for at least 35 min before recording. The temperature presentation order and timing were pseudo-randomized. We found that a temperature increase from 32 to 37 °C caused a significant increase in sinusoidal VOR gain of 17 % (P < 0.001). Temperature had no other effects on the behavioural VOR. Our data suggest that temperature effects on regularly firing afferents best correspond to the changes that we observed in the VOR gain.