Abstract
Eye movements are an integral part of human visual perception. They allow us to have a small foveal region with exquisite acuity and at the same time a large visual field. For a long time, eye movements were regarded as machine-like behaviors in response to visual stimulation1, but over the past few decades it has been convincingly shown that expectations, intended actions, rewards and many other cognitive factors can have profound effects on the way we move our eyes2-4. In order to be useful, our oculomotor system must minimize delay with respect to the dynamic events in the visual scene. The ability to do so has been demonstrated in situations where we are in control of these events, for example when we are making a sandwich or tea5, and when we are active participants, for example when hitting a cricket ball6. But what about scenes with complex dynamics that we do not control or directly take part in, like a hockey game we are watching as a spectator? A semantic influence on gaze fixation location during viewing of tennis videos has been suggested before7. Here we use carefully annotated hockey videos to show that the brain is indeed able to exploit the semantic context of the game to anticipate the continuous motion of the puck, leading to eye movements that are fundamentally different than when following exactly the same motion without any context.
Highlights
The estimated delay for the same trajectory of the puck was close to 0 ms in the full video condition (Figure 1B), demonstrating that with additional context information the visual oculomotor system can overcome internal processing delays to track complex target movements without significant time lags
The average number of saccades executed during each 10 s clip was just over 30% lower in the full video condition (25.31) compared with disk+gray (37.12) and disk+static (37.78) conditions (Figure 1C; both t14 > 13.63, p < 0.001)
This reduction was especially prominent for small saccades with amplitudes below 5 deg (Figure S1A), suggesting that fewer corrective saccades were needed to follow the puck in the full video condition
Summary
The estimated delay for the same trajectory of the puck was close to 0 ms in the full video condition (Figure 1B), demonstrating that with additional context information the visual oculomotor system can overcome internal processing delays to track complex target movements without significant time lags. We observed interesting differences in saccadic eye movements for the three conditions.
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