Eye-hand coordination for manual action

• Applicant: Miya Kato Rand, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2011 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 210670851

Purposeful activities of daily and occupational life involve complex manual actions, which require highly integrated eye-hand coordination and sensorimotor processing. The principles of eye-hand coordination for complex actions are poorly understood. Therefore, the proposed project investigates eye-hand coordination during different types of movements: discrete and sequential movements, transformed movement, and continuous movement. Both eye and hand movements are recorded simultaneously in three series of experiments. The first series investigates the relationship between the eye movement patterns and microstructures of hand movements that reflect distinct preplanned and feedback control processes in discrete and sequential movements. The second series investigates how eye movement patterns influence implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) sensorimotor processes that underlie learning of a visuomotor transformation where visual feedback of hand movement is rotated. The third series investigates the relationship between viewing locations and hand movement characteristics during continuous drawing-like movements. Spontaneous eye-hand coordination will be determined in all series of experiments, whereas the effects of unnatural eye-hand coordination will be examined in the second and third series to determine the functions of the spontaneously adapted eye-hand coordination.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants