Visuomotor Characterization of Eye Movements in a Drawing Task

Coen-Cagli, Ruben, et al. “Visuomotor characterization of eye movements in a drawing task.” Vision research 49.8 (2009): 810-818.

Abstract

Understanding visuomotor coordination requires the study of tasks that engage mechanisms for the integration of visual and motor information; in this paper we choose a paradigmatic yet little studied example of such a task, namely realistic drawing. On the one hand, our data indicate that the motor task has little influence on which regions of the image are overall most likely to be fixated: salient features are fixated most often. Viceversa, the effect of motor constraints is revealed in the temporal aspect of the scanpaths: (1) subjects direct their gaze to an object mostly when they are acting upon (drawing) it; and (2) in support of graphically continuous hand movements, scanpaths resemble edge-following patterns along image contours. For a better understanding of such properties, a computational model is proposed in the form of a novel kind of Dynamic Bayesian Network, and simulation results are compared with human eye–hand data.

LINK: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698909000686