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Gaze strategies during visually-guided versus memory-guided grasping

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An Erratum to this article was published on 13 February 2013

Abstract

Vision plays a crucial role in guiding motor actions. But sometimes we cannot use vision and must rely on our memory to guide action—e.g. remembering where we placed our eyeglasses on the bedside table when reaching for them with the lights off. Recent studies show subjects look towards the index finger grasp position during visually-guided precision grasping. But, where do people look during memory-guided grasping? Here, we explored the gaze behaviour of subjects as they grasped a centrally placed symmetrical block under open- and closed-loop conditions. In Experiment 1, subjects performed grasps in either a visually-guided task or memory-guided task. The results show that during visually-guided grasping, gaze was first directed towards the index finger’s grasp point on the block, suggesting gaze targets future grasp points during the planning of the grasp. Gaze during memory-guided grasping was aimed closer to the blocks’ centre of mass from block presentation to the completion of the grasp. In Experiment 2, subjects performed an ‘immediate grasping’ task in which vision of the block was removed immediately at the onset of the reach. Similar to the visually-guided results from Experiment 1, gaze was primarily directed towards the index finger location. These results support the 2-stream theory of vision in that motor planning with visual feedback at the onset of the movement is driven primarily by real-time visuomotor computations of the dorsal stream, whereas grasping remembered objects without visual feedback is driven primarily by the perceptual memory representations mediated by the ventral stream.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Kamyar Abhari for his technical assistance. This work was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) held by S. L. Prime and a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) held by J. J. Marotta.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, PO Box 600, Wellington, 6012, New Zealand

    Steven L. Prime

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

    Jonathan J. Marotta

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  1. Steven L. Prime
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  2. Jonathan J. Marotta
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Correspondence to Steven L. Prime.

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Prime, S.L., Marotta, J.J. Gaze strategies during visually-guided versus memory-guided grasping. Exp Brain Res 225, 291–305 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3358-3

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