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

手眼协调是熟练的人类表演的核心。这种协调对于日常生活、技术职业和娱乐环境中的许多活动都是必不可少的。需要精确地整合来自跨时间和三维空间的多种形式的感觉信息，以产生熟练的表现，这对中枢神经系统提出了复杂的要求。尽管这种神经系统控制的关键性质，以熟练的行为，我们的理解的视觉发展和熟练的学习的机制是有限的。因此，我的研究项目旨在揭示儿童和成人视觉表现和学习的控制机制。我的实验室最近的研究表明，儿童上肢运动控制的成熟，并证明眼睛和手的运动之间的关系是独特的儿童。值得注意的是，这些研究揭示了在儿童视觉学习过程中关于凝视行为和眼手协调变化的基础知识方面的差距。文献回顾还表明，很少有人知道的变化模式的时空协调之间的眼睛和手在成人专业知识的收购在具有挑战性的环境。因此，本研究提出了三个具体目标：（1）通过评估儿童在执行离散运动序列和连续视觉跟踪任务过程中的视觉学习，建立典型发育儿童眼手协调的成熟概况;（2）我们将阐明在典型发育的儿童和成人的视觉技能学习过程中，立体视对眼手协调变化的贡献;（3）我们将通过操纵成人的知觉和认知负荷来评估在具有挑战性的环境中注视行为和视觉协调的变化。总的来说，这项工作将通过推进我们对视觉控制机制及其在熟练行为发展和学习过程中的演变的认识，对神经发育和系统神经科学产生重大影响。这样的理解是必不可少的发展一个全面的神经模型的感觉运动控制，并最终建立适当的视觉训练协议，以增强儿童的神经发育，提高职业培训，并减少与年龄相关的感觉运动下降的影响。

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.