Modeling agile and versatile spatial behavior remains a challenging task, due to the intricate coupling of planning, control, and perceptual processes. Previous results have shown that humans plan and organize their guidance behavior by exploiting patterns in the interactions between agent or organism and the environment. These patterns, described under the concept of Interaction Patterns (IPs), capture invariants arising from equivalences and symmetries in the interaction with the environment, as well as effects arising from intrinsic properties of human control and guidance processes, such as perceptual guidance mechanisms. The paper takes a systems' perspective, considering the IP as a unit of organization, and builds on its properties to present a hierarchical model that delineates the planning, control, and perceptual processes and their integration. The model's planning process is further elaborated by showing that the IP can be abstracted, using spatial time-to-go functions. The perceptual processes are elaborated from the hierarchical model. The paper provides experimental support for the model's ability to predict the spatial organization of behavior and the perceptual processes.

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Visual gaze movement is one of the main processes in human interaction with the physical environment, and is a manifestation of the visual perception process. In humans, the interaction of gaze with environment involves mainly three patterns including fixation, smooth pursuit and saccade. This paper investigates two classification techniques to identify gaze patterns: an empirical threshold method and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). A registration process was initially performed to transform the gaze and environmental visual cues into a common coordinate system, which provides an additional feature to construct gaze models. With the gaze models, the HMM method accurately identifies gaze patterns in gaze trajectories, and in addition enables three types of applications. One is the detailed analysis of visuo-motor control behavior. The second is gaze-mediated teleoperation, showing the real-time capability of the gaze classification method. The third is the application to surgery tasks, enabling surgical skill analysis.