Abstract
Fitts’ law predicts the human movement response time for a specific task through a simple linear formulation, in which the intercept and the slope are estimated from the task’s empirical data. This research was motivated by our pilot study, which found that the linear regression’s essential assumptions are not satisfied in the literature. Furthermore, the keystone hypothesis in Fitts’ law, namely that the movement time per response will be directly proportional to the minimum average amount of information per response demanded by the particular amplitude and target width, has never been formally tested. Therefore, in this study we developed an optional formulation by combining the findings from the fields of psychology, physics, and physiology to fulfill the statistical assumptions. An experiment was designed to test the hypothesis in Fitts’ law and to validate the proposed model. To conclude, our results indicated that movement time could be related to the index of difficulty at the same amplitude. The optional formulation accompanies the index of difficulty in Shannon form and performs the prediction better than the traditional model. Finally, a new approach to modeling movement time prediction was deduced from our research results.
Highlights
Since Fitts’ study on the speed–accuracy trade-off in rapidly aimed movements [1]was published, many researchers have proposed different movement time prediction equations to compete with Fitts’ proposal
This statement implies that the average movement time will be identical for the same index of difficulty (ID) even with variations in movement amplitude and target width
Our results indicate that movement time is positively related to index of difficulty when the movement amplitude is the same for different ID values
Summary
Since Fitts’ study on the speed–accuracy trade-off in rapidly aimed movements [1]was published, many researchers have proposed different movement time prediction equations to compete with Fitts’ proposal. Readers can refer to a review paper [3] on mathematical formulations for Fitts’ law for one-dimensional targets. Soukoreff and Mackenzie published a paper with suggestions for using Fitts’ law [4]. One is the theoretical formulation category, with such formulations being derived from a specific theoretical argument proposed by various authors, with several studies [5,6,7,8,9] belonging to this subcategory. The other is the non-theoretical formulation category, proposed by other authors and not involving reasoning. Some examples in this category are Jagacinski et al.’s [10] and Kvålseth’s [11] studies
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