Gaze behavior during visuomotor tracking with complex hand-cursor dynamics

Abstract

The ability to track a moving target with the hand has been extensively studied, but few studies have characterized gaze behavior during this task. Here we investigate gaze behavior when participants learn a new mapping between hand and cursor motion, such that the cursor represented the position of a virtual mass attached to the grasped handle via a virtual spring. Depending on the experimental condition, haptic feedback consistent with mass-spring dynamics could also be provided. For comparison a simple oneto-one hand-cursor mapping was also tested. We hypothesized that gaze would be drawn, at times, to the cursor in the mass-spring conditions, especially in the absence of haptic feedback. As expected hand tracking performance was less accurate under the spring mapping, but gaze behavior was virtually unaffected by the spring mapping, regardless of whether haptic feedback was provided. Specifically, relative gaze position between target and cursor, rate of saccades, and gain of smooth pursuit were similar under both mappings and both haptic feedback conditions. We conclude that even when participants are exposed to a challenging hand-cursor mapping, gaze is primarily concerned about ongoing target motion suggesting that peripheral vision is sufficient to monitor cursor position and to update hand movement control.

Composition and decomposition of visuomotor maps during manual tracking

“…This parameter setting is consistent with previous studies investigating the manipulation of non-rigid objects (Danion et al 2012(Danion et al , 2017Dingwell et al 2002Dingwell et al , 2004Landelle et al 2016;Mathew et al 2019a;Nagengast et al 2009). Finally the fourth mapping, SPROT, resulted from the combination of the ROTATION and SPRING mappings, meaning that the cursor was both rotated and behaving like a mass-spring.…”

“…It was hypothesized that this metric would show strong modulations during adaptation to the ROTATION and SPROT perturbations, but not during the SPRING perturbation. The second metric was cursor velocity (i.e., mean tangential velocity in each trial) because hand/joystick velocity is amplified at the cursor level by the dynamics of the spring (Landelle et al 2016;Mathew et al 2019a). Following this line of reasoning, it was hypothesized that under initial exposure to the SPRING and SPROT mappings cursor velocity would substantially exceed target velocity (16 cm/s), while this would not be the case under ROTATION or Baseline.…”

“…Four groups of right-handed participants took part in this study (Group 1, N=20, Age: 22.8 ± 4.9 yrs., 12 female; Group 2, N=21, Age: 22.7 ± 6.2 yrs., 12 female; Group 3, N=21, Age: 22.3 ± 5.0 yrs., 14 female; Group 4, N=21, Age: 23.1 ± 45.8 yrs., 13 female). Although no formal a priori power analysis was performed, based on our previous experience using the 6 tracking task (Gouirand et al 2019;Mathew et al 2018Mathew et al , 2019a and pilot testing, we aimed for a sample size of at least n = 20 per group. We were able to collect 21 participants per group but had to drop one participant of Group 1.…”

Don’t watch your step: gaze behavior adapts with practice of a target stepping task

“…However, whether gaze behavior follows this pattern remains unclear. While several studies find gaze behavior to shift farther ahead when learning reaching or finger coordination (Perry et (Mathew et al 2019). In walking, the evidence is more mixed.…”

On the nature of eye-hand coordination in natural steering behavior

“…), in the sense that eyes precede motor actions, has been learned. Once learned, proactive eye fixations in eyehand coordination is robust and remains almost unchanged, even with a more complex task associated with performances impairment [18].…”