Visuomotor Characterization of Eye Movements in a Drawing Task

Understanding visuomotor coordination requires the study of tasks that engage mechanisms for the integration of visual and motor information; in this paper we choose a paradigmatic yet little studied example of such a task, namely realistic drawing. On the one hand, our data indicate that the motor task has little influence on which regions of the image are overall most likely to be fixated: salient features are fixated most often. Viceversa, the effect of motor constraints is revealed in the temporal aspect of the scanpaths: 1) sub jects direct their gaze to an ob ject mostly when they are acting upon (drawing) it; and 2) in suport of graphically continuous hand movements, scanpaths resemble edge–following patterns along image contours. For a better understanding of such properties, a computational model is proposed in the form of a novel kind of Dynamic Bayesian Network, and simulation results are compared with human eye–hand data.