Abstract
Numerous studies have addressed the issue of where people look when they perform hand movements. Yet, very little is known about how visuomotor performance is affected by fixation location. Previous studies investigating the accuracy of actions performed in visual periphery have revealed inconsistent results. While movements performed under full visual-feedback (closed-loop) seem to remain surprisingly accurate, open-loop as well as memory-guided movements usually show a distinct bias (i.e. overestimation of target eccentricity) when executed in periphery. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether gaze position affects movements that are performed under full-vision but cannot be corrected based on a direct comparison between the hand and target position. To do so, we employed a classical visuomotor reaching task in which participants were required to move their hand through a gap between two obstacles into a target area. Participants performed the task in four gaze conditions: free-viewing (no restrictions on gaze), central fixation, or fixation on one of the two obstacles. Our findings show that obstacle avoidance behaviour is moderated by fixation position. Specifically, participants tended to select movement paths that veered away from the obstacle fixated indicating that perceptual errors persist in closed-loop vision conditions if they cannot be corrected effectively based on visual feedback. Moreover, measuring the eye-movement in a free-viewing task (Experiment 2), we confirmed that naturally participants’ prefer to move their eyes and hand to the same spatial location.
Highlights
In order to interact with the world around us, evolution has provided humans with an extensive visual field but only with a small area of high visual acuity
In order to test if gaze position affected movement path selection, we calculated the average time-normalised trajectories for each gaze condition and obstacle configuration (Fig 2A–2C)
The 4 x 3 repeated-measures ANOVA on this data confirmed, as expected, a significant main effect of obstacle position, F(2,46) = 205.13, ε = .605, p < .001, suggesting that participants selected different trajectories depending on position of the obstacles
Summary
In order to interact with the world around us, evolution has provided humans with an extensive visual field but only with a small area of high visual acuity (the fovea). Ballard and colleagues [2, 3] discovered that even in a relatively complex manipulation task, such as stacking coloured blocks, participants prefer to fixate on each object they engage with rather than relying on peripheral information. Studies investigating where people preferably look when either performing simple reaching [9,10,11,12,13] and grasping movements [14,15,16], or more complex natural movement tasks [6, 17] have consistently shown that we prefer to foveate the objects we are manipulating and generally select fixation locations that are relevant for action planning and control
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