Abstract
We examined an eye-hand coordination task where optimal visual search and hand movement strategies were inter-related. Observers were asked to find and touch a target among five distractors on a touch screen. Their reward for touching the target was reduced by an amount proportional to how long they took to locate and reach to it. Coordinating the eye and the hand appropriately would markedly reduce the search-reach time. Using statistical decision theory we derived the sequence of interrelated eye and hand movements that would maximize expected gain and we predicted how hand movements should change as the eye gathered further information about target location. We recorded human observers' eye movements and hand movements and compared them with the optimal strategy that would have maximized expected gain. We found that most observers failed to adopt the optimal search-reach strategy. We analyze and describe the strategies they did adopt.
Highlights
In visually guided manual tasks that involve a sequence of targets, the movements of eye and hand are usually tightly linked [1,2,3,4]
In making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at home, you would typically fixate the jar of peanut butter while you move your hand toward it [5]
Observers were rewarded for minimizing the overall time to find and touch a target among distractors and we made the visual search and hand movements very slow so that a simple ‘‘handfollows-eye’’ strategy would reduce observers’ winnings considerably
Summary
In visually guided manual tasks that involve a sequence of targets, the movements of eye and hand are usually tightly linked [1,2,3,4]. In making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at home, you would typically fixate the jar of peanut butter while you move your hand toward it [5]. In such a task the relationship between eye and hand is simple: The hand always waits for the eye to fixate the target and ‘‘follows the eye’’. This strategy of coordination makes sense, intuitively. There were a rewarding alternative (e.g. watching your favorite television show), we might expect very different eye and hand movements in carrying out the same task
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