Eye-hand coordination and gaze behaviour changes during visuomotor development and learning

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Eye-hand coordination lies at the core of skilled human performance. Such coordination is essential to many activities of daily life, skilled occupations, and recreational settings. The need to precisely integrate sensory information from multiple modalities across time and three-dimensional space to produce skilled performance places complex demands on the central nervous system. Despite the critical nature of such nervous system control to skilled behaviour, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying visuomotor development and skilled learning is limited. Therefore, my research program seeks to reveal the control mechanisms involved in visuomotor performance and learning in children and adults. Recent studies from my lab characterized the maturation of upper limb movement control in children and demonstrated that the relationship between eye and hand movements is unique in children. Notably, these studies revealed a gap in fundamental knowledge regarding gaze behaviour and eye-hand coordination changes during visuomotor learning in children. Review of literature also shows that little is known about the changing pattern of spatiotemporal coordination between the eyes and hand in adults during expertise acquisition in challenging environments. Therefore, the current proposal addresses these gaps with three specific objectives: (1) we will establish the maturation profile of eye-hand coordination in typically developing children by assessing visuomotor learning during the performance of a discrete motor sequence and a continuous visuomotor tracking task; (2) we will clarify the contribution of stereoacuity to changes in eye-hand coordination during learning of visuomotor skills in typically-developing children and adults; (3) we will evaluate changes in gaze behaviour and visuomotor coordination in challenging environments by manipulating perceptual and cognitive load in adults. Overall, this work will significantly impact neurodevelopmental and systems neuroscience by advancing our knowledge of visuomotor control mechanisms and their evolution during the development and learning of skilled behaviours. Such understanding is essential for developing a comprehensive neural model of sensorimotor control, and ultimately, for establishing appropriate visuomotor training protocols to augment neurodevelopment in children, to improve occupational training, and to reduce the effects of age-related sensorimotor decline.