Sub-optimal eye movement strategies in simple visual and visuo-motor tasks L T Maloney1, H Zhang2, C Morvan3, L-A Etezad-Heydari1 |
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1Department of Psychology, New York University, NY, United States |
| We test whether human observers choose optimal eye movement strategies in three simple visual tasks where it is possible to calculate the optimal eye movement strategy maximizing. First we show that human observers do not minimize the expected number of saccades in planning saccades in a simple visual search task composed of only three tokens (Morvan & Maloney, 2012). Second, using a simple decision task, we directly evaluated human ability to anticipate their own retinal inhomogeneity. Observers exhibited large, patterned failures in their choices (Zhang, Morvan & Maloney, 2010). Last, we examined an eye-hand coordination task where optimal visual search and hand movement strategies were inter-related. Using Bayesian decision theory we derived the sequence of interrelated eye and hand movements that would maximize expected gain and we predicted how hand movements should change as the eye gathered further information about target location. We found that most observers failed to adopt the optimal eye movement strategy but that – given their choice of eye movement strategy – their choice of hand movement strategy came close to optimizing expected gain. We find little indication that the eye movement strategies adopted by human observers optimize their expected gain. |
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