28. May 2021 : Investigating gaze guidance behavior under VR conditions

Keshava A, Nezami FN, Neumann H, Izdebski K, Schüler T and König P (2021).
Just-in-time: Gaze guidance behavior while action planning and execution in VR.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.29.428782. bioRxiv

Eye movements in the natural environment have primarily been studied for common and repetitive tasks that require little attention once learnt. It is, however, unclear whether the same strategy is also applied, when the task is novel and involving a sequence of actions.
Here, we present a shelf sorting task allowing many variations to study attention mechanisms in a controlled, yet naturalistic virtual reality environment.
We found that subjects indeed use a just-in-time strategy of fixating on the task relevant objects and sacrifice optimality by offloading cognitive task demands on the environment.
These findings also lend further support to the embodied cognitive framework of cognitive processing in natural environments.