Abstract
When trying to intercept a target that is moving along a straight path or flying through the air, people tend to follow it with their eyes throughout its motion. If the target is clearly going to bounce before reaching them, as it often does in cricket, (table) tennis or squash, people tend to make a saccade to a position close to which the target will bounce and to pursue it again from there. Presumably, it is important to be looking at the target as one approaches it, and the eyes cannot accurately follow the abrupt change in the target's motion when it bounces, so the eyes move in a manner that enhances pursuit after the bounce. We wondered whether finding out that an approaching target is going to bounce when it is already on its way is enough for people to adjust their eye movements to the fact that its motion will change abruptly when it bounces, or whether they can only make such anticipatory adjustments if they know in advance that the target will bounce. To find out, we conducted two experiments in which some moving targets bounced 500 ms after they appeared, and others did not. In one experiment it was impossible to predict whether an individual target would bounce off a visible structure or keep moving in a straight line. In the other experiment targets that would bounce were red whereas ones that would not were blue. We found that participants used the fact that they could anticipate the approaching target's behavior in the second experiment to alter their gaze strategy. Their eyes followed the target more closely near the time of the bounce when they knew that the target would bounce. We conclude that visual information can quickly guide strategic eye movements
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017