Abstract
In a cyclical Fitts’ task, hand movements transition from continuous to discrete movements when the Index of Difficulty (ID) increases. Moreover, at high ID (small target), the eyes saccade to and subsequently fixate the targets at every movement, while at low ID (large target) intermittent monitoring is used. By hypothesis, the (periodic) gaze shifts are abandoned for movement times shorter than about 0.350 s due to systemic constraints (i.e., a refractory period and intrinsic latency). If so, the transition in eye and hand movements is independent. To investigate these issues, the present study examined the effects of changing ID via the targets’ width or distance as well as hysteresis in eye–hand coordination. To this aim, 14 participants performed a cyclical Fitts’ task while their hand and eye movements were recorded simultaneously. The results show that the transition in eye–hand synchronization (at 2.87 bit; 0.25 s) and in hand dynamics (at 4.85 bit; 0.81 s) neither co-occurred nor correlated. Some small width vs. distance dissociations and hysteresis effects were found, but they disappeared when eye–hand synchronization was viewed as a function of movement time rather than ID. This confirms that a minimal between-saccade time is the limiting factor in eye–hand synchronization. Additionally, the timing between the start of the hand movement and the saccade appeared to be relatively constant (at 0.15 s) and independent of movement time, implying a constant delay that should be implemented in a dynamical model of eye–hand coordination.
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Notes
Determining the corresponding eye movement is somewhat arbitrary at low IDs, when only few eye movements are made that are (at best) weakly phase locked to the hand movements only. We chose a limit of MT + 0.2 s for determining which hand movement a saccade belongs to. Thus, if eye movement was initiated more than 0.2 s after the hand had already arrived at the target, the gaze was considered as being early for the next movement, instead of being late for the previous one.
Lazzari et al. (2009) report that for movement times lower than 350 ms, the E/H ratio decreases, but they do not report critical values where E/H ratio = 0.5 as we did here. Visual comparison of the data suggest that our results are similar to those reported by Lazzari and colleagues.
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de Vries, S., Huys, R. & Zanone, P.G. Keeping your eye on the target: eye–hand coordination in a repetitive Fitts’ task. Exp Brain Res 236, 3181–3190 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-018-5369-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-018-5369-1