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The Journal of Neuroscience, September 28, 2005, 25(39):8833-8842; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2658-05.2005

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Eye–Hand Coordination during Learning of a Novel Visuomotor Task

Uta Sailer,¹ J. Randall Flanagan,^1,2 and Roland S. Johansson¹

¹Physiology Section, Department of Integrative Medical Biology, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden, and ²Department of Psychology and Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6

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.

Key words: eye–hand coordination; motor learning; hand movement; object manipulation; gaze fixation; saccade

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Received Feb 22, 2005; revised August 11, 2005; accepted August 12, 2005.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				L. A. Mrotek and J. F. Soechting Target Interception: Hand-Eye Coordination and Strategies J. Neurosci., July 4, 2007; 27(27): 7297 - 7309. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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