Jolande Fooken

Queen's University | QueensU · Department of Psychology

Eye movements aid visual perception and guide actions such as reaching or grasping. Most previous work on eyehand coordination has focused on saccadic eye movements. Here we show that smooth pursuit eye movement accuracy strongly predicts both interception accuracy and the strategy used to intercept a moving object. We developed a naturalistic task...

Dynamic visual acuity (DVA) is the ability to resolve fine spatial detail in dynamic objects during head fixation, or in static objects during head or body rotation. This ability is important for many activities such as ball sports, and a close relation has been shown between DVA and sports expertise. DVA tasks involve eye movements, yet, it is unc...

In our natural environment, we interact with moving objects that are surrounded by richly textured, dynamic visual contexts. Yet, most laboratory studies on vision and movement show visual objects in front of uniform grey backgrounds. Context effects on eye movements have been widely studied, but it is less well known how visual contexts affect han...

Eye and hand movements are closely linked when performing everyday actions. We conducted a perceptual-motor training study to investigate mutually beneficial effects of eye and hand movements, asking whether training in one modality benefits performance in the other. Observers had to predict the future trajectory of a briefly presented moving objec...

Motion in depth is commonly misperceived in Virtual Reality (VR), making it difficult to intercept moving objects, for example, in games. We investigate whether motion cues could be modified to improve these interactions in VR. We developed a time-to-contact estimation task, in which observers ( $n=18$ ) had to indicate by button press when a loom...

Research on eye-hand coordination has focused on action tasks performed in isolation. However, real world action tasks are often performed concurrently with perception tasks that compete for gaze. Here we examine how participants adapt their eye and hand movements when performing an object manipulation task—in which they repeatedly grasped a ball a...

Humans can quickly generate eye and hand responses to unpredictable changes in the environment. Here, we investigated eye-hand coordination in a rapid interception task where human participants used a virtual paddle to intercept a moving target. The target moved vertically down a computer screen and could suddenly ‘jump’ to the left or right. In hi...

Real-world actions require one to simultaneously perceive, think, and act on the surrounding world, requiring the integration of (bottom-up) sensory information and (top-down) cognitive and motor signals. Studying these processes involves the intellectual challenge of cutting across traditional neuroscience silos, and the technical challenge of rec...

Real world search tasks often involve action on a target object once it has been located. However, few studies have examined whether movement-related costs associated with acting on located objects influence visual search. Here, using a task in which participants reached to a target object after locating it, we examined whether people take into acc...

Real world search behaviour often involves limb movements, either during search or following search. Here we investigated whether movement-related costs influence search behaviour in two kinds of search tasks. In our visual search tasks, participants made saccades to find a target object among distractors and then moved a cursor, controlled by the...

Objects in our visual environment often move unpredictably and can suddenly speed up or slow down. The ability to account for acceleration when interacting with moving objects can be critical for survival. Here, we investigate how human observers track an accelerating target with their eyes and predict its time of reappearance after a temporal occl...

Modern slot machines are among the more harmful forms of gambling. Psychophysiological measures may provide a window into mental processes that underpin these harms. Here we investigated pupil dilation derived from eye tracking as a means of capturing changes in sympathetic nervous system arousal following outcomes on a real slot machine. We hypoth...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that includes motor impairments such as tremor, bradykinesia, and postural instability. Although eye movement deficits are commonly found in saccade and pursuit tasks, preservation of oculomotor function has also been reported. Here we investigate specific task and stimulus conditions under wh...

Objects in our visual environment often move unpredictably and can suddenly speed up or slow down. The ability to account for acceleration when interacting with moving objects can be critical for survival. Here, we investigate how human observers track an accelerating target with their eyes and predict its time of reappearance after a temporal occl...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that includes motor impairments such as tremor, bradykinesia, and postural instability. Although eye movement deficits are commonly found in saccade and pursuit tasks, preservation of oculomotor function has also been reported. Here we investigate specific task and stimulus conditions under wh...

When we catch a moving object in mid-flight, our eyes and hands are directed toward the object. Yet, the functional role of eye movements in guiding interceptive hand movements is not yet well understood. This review synthesizes emergent views on the importance of eye movements during manual interception with an emphasis on laboratory studies publi...

When remembering an object at a given location, participants tend to return their gaze to that location even after the object has disappeared, known as Looking-at-Nothing (LAN). However, it is unclear whether LAN is associated with better memory performance. Previous studies reporting beneficial effects of LAN have often not systematically manipula...

Background and aims: Immersion during slot machine gambling has been linked to disordered gambling. Current conceptualizations of immersion (namely dissociation, flow, and the machine zone) make contrasting predictions as to whether gamblers are captivated by the game per se ('zoned in') or motivated by the escape that immersion provides ('zoned o...

Real-world tasks, such as avoiding obstacles, require a sequence of interdependent decisions to reach accurate motor outcomes. Yet, most studies on primate decision making involve simple one-step choices. Here we investigate how sensorimotor decisions develop over time. In a go/no-go interception task human observers (n=42) judged whether a briefly...

Neural activity in brain areas involved in the planning and execution of eye movements predicts the outcome of an upcoming perceptual decision. Many real-world decisions, such as whether to swing at a baseball pitch, are accompanied by characteristic eye-movement behavior. Here we ask whether human eye-movement kinematics can sensitively predict de...

The perception of visual motion and the ability to track a moving target with smooth pursuit eye movements are strongly context-dependent. Despite similar processing mechanisms and pathways, visual contexts can have opposite effects on perception and pursuit (Spering & Gegenfurtner 2007; 2008): context motion in a particular direction can speed up...

Tracking a moving object with smooth pursuit eye movements enhances our ability to predict an object's trajectory. Here we assessed the relationship between pursuit and hand movements and compared the efficacy of different training protocols on eye and hand movement accuracy. In a novel track-intercept task observers tracked a target moving across...