Keeping Your Eye, Head, and Hand on the Ball: Rapidly Orchestrated Visuomotor Behavior in a Continuous Action Task

In everyday life, we must adapt our behavior to a continuous stream of tasks and time motor responses and periods of resting accordingly. To mimic these challenges, we used a continuous interception computer game (Pong) on an iPad. This allowed us to measure the coordination of eye, hand, and head movements during natural sequential behavior while maintaining the benefits of experimental control. Participants intercepted a moving ball by sliding a paddle at the bottom of the screen so that the ball bounced back and moved toward the computerized opponent. We tested i) how participants adapted their eye, hand, and head movements to this dynamic, continuous task, ii) whether these adaptations are related to interception performance, and iii) how their behavior changed under different conditions and iv) over time. We showed that all movements are carefully adapted to the upcoming action. Pursuit eye movements provide crucial motion information and are emphasized shortly before participants must act; a strategy associated with better performance. Participants also increasingly used pursuit eye movements under more difficult conditions (fast targets and small paddles). Saccades, blinks, and head movements, which would lead to information loss, are minimized at critical times of interception. These strategic patterns are intuitively established and maintained over time and across manipulations. We conclude that humans carefully orchestrate their full repertoire of movements to aid performance and finely adjust them to the changing demands of our environment.