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The Journal of Neuroscience, July 4, 2007, 27(27):7297-7309; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2046-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Target Interception: Hand–Eye Coordination and Strategies

Leigh A. Mrotek¹ and John F. Soechting²

¹Department of Kinesiology and Health, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Oshkosh, Wisconsin 54901, and ²Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. John F. Soechting, Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, 6-145 Jackson Hall, 321 Church Street Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55455. Email: soech001{at}umn.edu

This study was designed to define the characteristics of eye–hand coordination in a task requiring the interception of a moving target. It also assessed the extent to which the motion of the target was predicted and the strategies subjects used to determine when to initiate target interception. Target trajectories were constructed from sums of sines in the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Subjects intercepted these trajectories by moving their index finger along the surface of a display monitor. They were free to initiate the interception at any time, and on successful interception, the target disappeared. Although they were not explicitly instructed to do so, subjects tracked target motion with normal, high-gain smooth-pursuit eye movements right up until the target was intercepted. However, the probability of catch-up saccades was substantially depressed shortly after the onset of manual interception. The initial direction of the finger movement anticipated the motion of the target by 150 ms. For any given trajectory, subjects tended to initiate interception at predictable times that depended on the characteristics of the target trajectories [i.e., when the curvature (or angular velocity) of the target was small and when the target was moving toward the finger]. The relative weighting of various parameters that influenced the decision to initiate interception varied from subject to subject and was not accounted for by a model based on the short-range predictability of target motion.

Key words: saccades; smooth pursuit; motion prediction; finger movements; optimal strategies; curvilinear motion

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Received March 1, 2007; revised May 29, 2007; accepted May 30, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. John F. Soechting, Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, 6-145 Jackson Hall, 321 Church Street Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55455. Email: soech001{at}umn.edu

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