Seeing does not mean processing: where we look and the visual information we rely on change independently as we learn a novel walking task.

Abstract

People use vision to inform motor control strategies during walking. With practice performing a target stepping task, people shift their gaze farther ahead, transitioning from watching their feet contact the target to looking for future target locations. The shift in gaze focus suggests the role of vision in motor control changes from emphasizing feedback to feedforward control. The present study examines whether changing visual fixation location is accompanied by a similar change in reliance upon visual information. Twenty healthy young adults practiced stepping on moving targets projected on the surface of a treadmill. Periodically, participants' visual reliance was probed by hiding stepping targets which inform feedback or feedforward (targets < or > 1.5 steps ahead, respectively) motor control strategies. We calculated visual reliance as the increase in step error when targets were hidden. We hypothesized that with practice, participant reliance on feedback visual information would decrease and their reliance on feedforward visual information would increase. Contrary to our hypothesis, participants became significantly more reliant on feedback visual information with practice (p < 0.001) but their reliance on feedforward visual information did not change (p = 0.49). Participants' reliance on visual information increased despite looking significantly farther ahead with practice (p < 0.016). Together, these results suggest that participants fixated on feedback information less. However, changes in fixation pattern did not reduce their reliance upon feedback information as stepping performance still significantly decreased when feedback information was removed after training. These findings provide important context for how the role of vision in controlling walking changes with practice.