Coordinating Vision and Action in Natural Behaviour: Differences in Spatiotemporal Coupling in Everyday Tasks

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Author(s)
Scrafton, Sharon
Stainer, Matthew J
Tatler, Benjamin W
Year published
2017
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Show full item recordAbstract
Vision and action are tightly coupled in space and time: for many tasks we must look at the right place at the right time to gather the information that we need to complete our behavioural goals. Vision typically leads action by about 0.5 seconds in many natural tasks. However, the factors that influence this temporal coordination are not well understood, and variations have been found previously between two domestic tasks each with similar constraints: tea making and sandwich making. This study offers a systematic exploration of the factors that govern spatiotemporal coordination of vision and action within complex real-world ...
View more >Vision and action are tightly coupled in space and time: for many tasks we must look at the right place at the right time to gather the information that we need to complete our behavioural goals. Vision typically leads action by about 0.5 seconds in many natural tasks. However, the factors that influence this temporal coordination are not well understood, and variations have been found previously between two domestic tasks each with similar constraints: tea making and sandwich making. This study offers a systematic exploration of the factors that govern spatiotemporal coordination of vision and action within complex real-world activities. We found that the temporal coordination eye movements and action differed between tea making and sandwich making. Longer eye–hand latencies, more “look ahead” fixations and more looks to irrelevant objects were found when making tea than when making a sandwich. Contrary to previous suggestions, we found that the requirement to move around the environment did not influence the coordination of vision and action. We conclude that the dynamics of visual behaviour during motor acts are sensitive to the task and specific objects and actions required but not to the spatial demands requiring movement around an environment.
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View more >Vision and action are tightly coupled in space and time: for many tasks we must look at the right place at the right time to gather the information that we need to complete our behavioural goals. Vision typically leads action by about 0.5 seconds in many natural tasks. However, the factors that influence this temporal coordination are not well understood, and variations have been found previously between two domestic tasks each with similar constraints: tea making and sandwich making. This study offers a systematic exploration of the factors that govern spatiotemporal coordination of vision and action within complex real-world activities. We found that the temporal coordination eye movements and action differed between tea making and sandwich making. Longer eye–hand latencies, more “look ahead” fixations and more looks to irrelevant objects were found when making tea than when making a sandwich. Contrary to previous suggestions, we found that the requirement to move around the environment did not influence the coordination of vision and action. We conclude that the dynamics of visual behaviour during motor acts are sensitive to the task and specific objects and actions required but not to the spatial demands requiring movement around an environment.
View less >
Journal Title
Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology
Volume
71
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2017 American Psycological Association. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. Reproduced here in accordance with publisher policy. Please refer to the journal link for access to the definitive, published version.
Subject
Psychology
Cognitive and computational psychology
Cognition