Humans often act in dynamically changing environments that require rapid motor adjustments, and the motor system is capable of modifying ongoing actions in response to unexpected changes. In their study, Goodale et al. (1986) demonstrated that participants could adjust their pointing movements to compensate for targets that were displaced during saccadic eye movements, even though they were unaware of the displacement. The current study examines whether such adjustments remain robust under cognitive load and systematically tests whether target shifts truly go undetected. To this end, participants perform pointing tasks with gaze-contingent target shifts, under single- and dual-task conditions. In this paradigm, the target is displaced during a saccade and because visual sensitivity is reduced during saccades (saccadic blindness), these displacements typically go unnoticed. In order to test whether the motor system is immune to the dual task interference, hand and eye movement parameters, such as velocity profiles and pointing accuracy, will be compared between single- and dual-task conditions. A separate two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task evaluates participants’ perceptual awareness to gaze-contingent target shifts. By combining these two tasks, the study aims to clarify how perceptual awareness and cognitive load influences visuomotor control, and preliminary results will be shared to illustrate these effects.

References:

Goodale, M. A., Pelisson, D., & Prablanc, C. (1986). Large adjustments in visually guided reaching do not depend on vision of the hand or perception of target displacement. Nature, 320(6064), 748-750.