Eye Movements in Perception, Interaction and Visual Guidance of Actions

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We perceive the world around us by continuously moving our eyes to see different locations in fine detail. Over the past few decades, researchers have obtained a good understanding of where we are most likely to look, for example, when we read a book or a computer screen, or when we look at photos or movies. This is, however, only one part of the story. When with work on something with our hands, for example, building something or cooking a dinner, we use our eyes to guide our hands. In other words, we also use our vision to control our actions. This eye-hand coordination is much less understood, mostly because only recently have good quality eye trackers become available that are able to track our eyes while we move our head and body. ******The goal of this project is a systematic investigation of eye movements in eye-hand coordination, which will lead to answers to the following questions. How do the properties of objects we interact with affect the eye movements? For example, how do eye movements change depending on the number of objects we are interacting with, whether the objects are static or moving, or whether there are obstacles to our intended manipulations? How does the intended interaction with the objects affect eye movements? For example, does it matter whether we simply want to touch an object, or grab it, or manipulate it? Does it matter whether we interact with an object with the hands or a tool? Finding answers to these questions will lead to a much better understanding of eye-hand coordination.******A few examples illustrate the importance of this research. 1) We have developed an interactive table for patients in physical rehabilitation, and a prototype system is currently in daily use at a local rehabilitation hospital. We need, however, a much better understanding of how the patients use the table in order to make it more adaptive to their needs and abilities. A good understanding of eye-hand coordination will allow this. 2) We are developing a new method for tracking how much amputees rely on vision to operate a prosthetic arm, which we do by combining movement tracking with eye tracking. This will allow us to assess to what extent an amputee must physically watch the artificial arm in order to operate it and will allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of different prosthesis devices. 3) Soon there will be smartphones and tablets on the market that can respond not only to touch, but also to hand movements and eye movements. In order to design and use these devices effectively, we must have a better understanding of the interaction between eye movements and hand movements. My research will make this possible.**