Eye–Hand Coordination during Learning of a Novel Visuomotor Task

By Uta Sailer, J. Flanagan, Roland S. Johansson. 2005

302 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigated how gaze behavior and eye–hand coordination change when subjects learned a challenging visuomotor task that required acquisition of a novel mapping between bimanual actions and their visual sensory consequences. By applying isometric forces and torques to a rigid tool held freely between the two hands, subjects learned to control a cursor on a computer screen to hit successively displayed targets as quickly as possible. The learning occurred in stages that could be distinguished by changes in performance (target–hit rate) as well as by gaze behavior and eye–hand coordination. In a first exploratory stage, the hit rate was consistently low, the cursor position varied widely, and gaze typically pursued the cursor. In a second skill acquisition stage, the hit rate improved rapidly, and gaze fixations began to mark predictively desired cursor positions, indicating that subjects started to program spatially congruent eye and hand motor commands. In a third skill refinement stage, performance continued to improve gradually, and gaze shifted directly toward the target. We suggest that during the exploratory stage, the learner attempts to establish basic mapping rules between manual actions and eye-movement commands. In this process, subjects may establish correlations between hand motor commands and their visual sensory consequences, primarily in fovea-anchored, gaze-centered coordinates, and correlations between recent hand motor commands and eye motor commands. The established mapping rules are then implemented and refined in the skill acquisition and refinement stages.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Goal Babbling Permits Direct Learning of Inverse Kinematics (2010, background): “Sailer and Flanagan [33] found stage like characteristics of the learning progress: an initial plateau, a rapid transition to successful control and ﬁne tuning.”
Eye movements and the control of actions in everyday life. (2006, background): “This is what we observe once an action has been learned, but does this pattern hold during the period while the skill is being acquired? A recent study by Sailer et al. (2005), the first of its kind, has clearly demonstrated that the answer is no.”
Motor learning. (2010, background): “This would undermine the effectiveness of punishment and partner switching [6], which are used by clients of L.”
Eye guidance in natural vision: Reinterpreting salience (2011, unknown): “In a study that explored the development of eye–hand coordination in a novel task, Sailer, Flanagan, and Johansson (2005) used a mouse-like control task to show that initially the eyes lagged behind action, apparently providing feedback information about the success of the last maneuver.”
Coding and use of tactile signals from the fingertips in object manipulation tasks (2009, background): “That is, during learning the gaze behaviour gradually shifts from pursuing poorly controlled hand movements to a mode in which the gaze predicts forthcoming contact location”
Principles of sensorimotor learning (2011, background): “When learning to control a cursor to hit targets under a novel visuomotor mapping , eye movements change across learning stages, with gaze reactively chasing the cursor in early learning and simply fixating the target after extensive practice 6 .”