Modeling trade-off between time-optimal and minimum energy in saccade main sequence

Abstract

Saccadic eye movement is highly stereotyped and commonly believed to be governed by an open-loop control mechanism. We propose a principle combining time-optimal and minimum control energy criteria to account for the saccade main sequence as observed from empirical data. The model prediction revealed that the weighting factor of the energy conservation becomes more dominant than the time-optimal when the saccade amplitude is large. We demonstrate that the proposed model is a general form synthesizing the time-optimum, minimum torque change, and minimum control effort models. In addition, we show the connection between our model and the stochastic minimum variance models from the aspect of optimization.