Judgments of approach speed for motorcycles across different lighting levels and the effect of an improved tri-headlight configuration.

The misperception of vehicle approach speed is a key contributory factor to road traffic crash involvement. Past research has indicated that individuals use the rate of visual looming to calculate the time to passage (TTP) of a vehicle, and that smaller vehicles loom to a lesser extent than larger vehicles. Despite a disproportionate number of fatal injuries occurring on the road after dark, and a higher than average number of accidents involving automobile drivers violating the right of way of a motorcyclist occurring in low light conditions, there has been very little consideration of the accuracy of TTP for smaller and larger vehicles under low levels of luminance. We investigated drivers' judgments of motorcycle and car approach speeds across a number of levels of luminance within a virtual city scene, as well as the effectiveness of a tri-headlight formation on motorcycle speed judgments. The accuracy of car approach speed judgments were not affected by changes in lighting conditions, but speed judgments for the solo headlight motorcycle became significantly less accurate as lighting reduced in the early night and night-time conditions. Incorporation of a tri-headlight formation onto the standard motorcycle frame resulted in improved accuracy of approach speed judgments, relative to the solo headlight motorcycle, as ambient light levels reduced. The practical implications of the findings are discussed in terms of road safety and motorcycle design.

Errors in judging the approach rate of motorcycles in nighttime conditions and the effect of an improved lighting configuration.

One of the key contributory factors for accident involvement is misjudgment of approach speed (Department for Transport, 2010). Past research has indicated that individuals can use the rate of visual looming in order to the judge time to passage (TTP) of approaching vehicles, and that smaller vehicles loom to a lesser extent than larger vehicles (e.g., Horswill et al., 2005). However, the judgment of TTP in nighttime conditions has received little attention. This paper explores drivers' abilities to make judgments of motorcycles and car approach speeds in nighttime driving conditions, when only the headlights are visible, as well as the effectiveness of a tri-headlight configuration on the accuracy of motorcycle speed judgments. Results showed that individuals were significantly more accurate at judging the speed of two car headlights compared with the standard solo headlight motorcycle. However, the inclusion of a tri-headlight formation on a standard motorcycle frame significantly improved these judgments. A further investigation demonstrated that tri-headlight configurations with separation between headlights on the horizontal and vertical axes are most effective for yielding accurate speed judgments. The implications of the results for road safety and motorcycle design are discussed.

Using vision to control locomotion: looking where you want to go.

Looking at the inside edge of the road when steering a bend seems to be a well-established strategy linked to using a feature called the tangent point. An alternative proposal suggests that the gaze patterns observed when steering result from looking at the points in the world through which one wishes to pass. In this explanation fixation on or near the tangent point results from trying to take a trajectory that cuts the corner. To test these accounts, we recorded gaze and steering when taking different paths along curved roadways. Participants could gauge and maintain their lateral distance, but crucially, gaze was predominantly directed to the region proximal to the desired path rather than toward the tangent point per se. These results show that successful control of high-speed locomotion requires fixations in the direction you want to steer rather than using a single road feature like the tangent point.

Problems in the coupling of eye and hand in the sequential movements of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder.

BACKGROUND: Shifting gaze and attention ahead of the hand is a natural component in the performance of skilled manual actions. Very few studies have examined the precise co-ordination between the eye and hand in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). METHODS: This study directly assessed the maturity of eye-hand co-ordination in children with DCD. A double-step pointing task was used to investigate the coupling of the eye and hand in 7-year-old children with and without DCD. Sequential targets were presented on a computer screen, and eye and hand movements were recorded simultaneously. RESULTS: There were no differences between typically developing (TD) and DCD groups when completing fast single-target tasks. There were very few differences in the completion of the first movement in the double-step tasks, but differences did occur during the second sequential movement. One factor appeared to be the propensity for the DCD children to delay their hand movement until some period after the eye had landed on the target. This resulted in a marked increase in eye-hand lead during the second movement, disrupting the close coupling and leading to a slower and less accurate hand movement among children with DCD. CONCLUSIONS: In contrast to skilled adults, both groups of children preferred to foveate the target prior to initiating a hand movement if time allowed. The TD children, however, were more able to reduce this foveation period and shift towards a feedforward mode of control for hand movements. The children with DCD persevered with a look-then-move strategy, which led to an increase in error. For the group of DCD children in this study, there was no evidence of a problem in speed or accuracy of simple movements, but there was a difficulty in concatenating the sequential shifts of gaze and hand required for the completion of everyday tasks or typical assessment items.

Disruption of sitting balance after stroke: influence of spoken output.

OBJECTIVES: To identify the extent of dual task interference between cognitive and motor tasks, (cognitive motor interference (CMI)) in sitting balance during recovery from stroke; to compare CMI in sitting balance between stroke and non-stroke groups; and to record any changes to CMI during sitting that correlate with functional recovery. METHOD: 36 patients from stroke rehabilitation settings in three NHS trusts. Healthy control group: 21 older volunteers. Measures of seated postural sway were taken in unsupported sitting positions, alone, or concurrently with either a repetitive utterance task or an oral word category generation task. Outcome measures were variability of sway area, path length of sway, and the number of valid words generated. RESULTS: Stroke patients were generally less stable than controls during unsupported sitting tasks. They showed greater sway during repetitive speech compared with quiet sitting, but did not show increased instability to posture between repetitive speech and word category generation. When compared with controls, stroke patients experienced greater dual task interferences during repetitive utterance but not during word generation. Sway during repetitive speech was negatively correlated with concurrent function on the Barthel ADL index. CONCLUSIONS: The stroke patients showed postural instability and poor word generation skills. The results of this study show that the effort of verbal utterances alone was sufficient to disturb postural control early after stroke, and the extent of this instability correlated with concomitant Barthel ADL function.

The effect of learning condition on perceptual anticipation, awareness, and visual search.

The efficacy of explicit and implicit learning paradigms was examined during the very early stages of learning the perceptual-motor anticipation task of predicting ball direction from temporally occluded footage of soccer penalty kicks. In addition, the effect of instructional condition on point-of-gaze during learning was examined. A significant improvement in horizontal prediction accuracy was observed in the explicit learning group; however, similar improvement was evident in a placebo group who watched footage of soccer matches. Only the explicit learning intervention resulted in changes in eye movement behaviour and increased awareness of relevant postural cues. Results are discussed in terms of methodological and practical issues regarding the employment of implicit perceptual training interventions.

The role of size and binocular information in guiding reaching: insights from virtual reality and visual form agnosia III (of III).

Reaching out to grasp an object requires information about the size of the object and the distance between the object and the body. We used a virtual reality system with a control population and a patient with visual form agnosia (DF) in order to explore the use of binocular information and size cues in prehension. The experiments consisted of a perceptual matching task in addition to a prehension task. In the prehension task, control participants modified their reach distance in response to step changes in vergence in the absence of any clear reference for relative disparity. Their reach distance was unaffected by equivalent step changes in size, even though they used this information to modify grasp and showed a size bias in a distance matching task. Notably, DF showed the same pattern of results as the controls but was far more sensitive to step changes in vergence. This finding complements previous research suggesting that DF relies predominantly on vergence information when gauging target distance. The results from the perceptual matching tasks confirmed previous findings suggesting that DF is unable to make use of size information for perceptual matching, including distance comparisons. These data are discussed with regard to the properties of the pathways subserving the two visual cortical processing streams.

Heading perception and the allocation of attention.

A central theme in previous studies of heading judgements has been whether the retinal flow field can be decomposed to recover the translation component of locomotion when flow also contains the effects of gaze rotation. We explored not just the effect of moving gaze, but also moving attention away from the locomotor path by presenting the case of fixating a road sign and completing different attentional tasks during locomotion. Heading errors increased significantly with attentional load, in the absence of extra-retinal gaze information. When we introduced extra-retinal gaze information with the same tasks this resulted in a significant improvement in heading judgements. These results lead us to question whether the decomposition argument translates to real-world judgements of locomotor heading. If observers need to closely attend to roadside information it seems that decomposition is ineffective, whereas if they have the latitude to alternate gaze it is unnecessary.

Visual-proprioceptive mapping in children with developmental coordination disorder.

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) occurs in a small but significant proportion of children who present with impaired body-eye coordination and show poor acquisition of motor skills. This study investigated the visual-proprioceptive mapping ability of children with DCD from a small selected group, with particular reference to the use of vision in matching tasks. The children with DCD in this study were significantly poorer than control children on all matching tasks. They seemed to have particular difficulty in cross-modal judgements that required the use of visual information to guide proprioceptive judgements of limb position. A distinction is drawn between tasks that can be achieved purely through sensory matching and those that require body-centred spatial judgements, suggesting that it is the latter that posits a particular difficulty for children with DCD.

Weighted combination of size and disparity: a computational model for timing a ball catch.

How do we time hand closure to catch a ball? Binocular disparity and optical looming provide two sources of information about an object's motion in depth, but the relative effectiveness of the two cues depends on ball size. Based on results from a virtual reality ball-catching task, we derive a simple model that uses both cues. The model is sensitive to the relative effectiveness of size and disparity and implicitly switches its response to the cue that specifies the earliest arrival and away from a cue that is lost or below threshold. We demonstrate the model's robustness by predicting the response of participants to some very unusual ball trajectories in a virtual reality task.

Steering, optic flow, and the respective importance of depth and retinal motion distribution.

Movement through an environment produces an optical spatiotemporal pattern, known as a flow field. When visually guiding movement using a flow field, do humans make use of information about the distance of constituent elements? Employing a novel active steering task, we examined the use of depth (height-in-scene and disparity) and the role of the retinal motion distribution in the perceptual control of heading from flow. We found that retinal motion distribution, rather than depth order, has the primary role in determining the accuracy of steering.

Guidance of locomotion on foot uses perceived target location rather than optic flow.

What visual information do we use to guide movement through our environment? Self-movement produces a pattern of motion on the retina, called optic flow. During translation, the direction of movement (locomotor direction) is specified by the point in the flow field from which the motion vectors radiate - the focus of expansion (FoE) [1-3]. If an eye movement is made, however, the FoE no longer specifies locomotor direction [4], but the 'heading' direction can still be judged accurately [5]. Models have been proposed that remove confounding rotational motion due to eye movements by decomposing the retinal flow into its separable translational and rotational components ([6-7] are early examples). An alternative theory is based upon the use of invariants in the retinal flow field [8]. The assumption underpinning all these models (see also [9-11]), and associated psychophysical [5,12,13] and neurophysiological studies [14-16], is that locomotive heading is guided by optic flow. In this paper we challenge that assumption for the control of direction of locomotion on foot. Here we have explored the role of perceived location by recording the walking trajectories of people wearing displacing prism glasses. The results suggest that perceived location, rather than optic or retinal flow, is the predominant cue that guides locomotion on foot.

Eye movements, prematurity and developmental co-ordination disorder.

Horizontal pursuit eye movements were investigated in two separate groups of children: One group exhibited developmental co-ordination disorder (n = 8) whilst another group of children were born prematurely (n = 8). Both studies found a reduced gain in pursuit eye movements when the respective populations were compared with control groups (n = 32). A difference was also found in the ability of some children to temporally synchronize their tracking response to the stimulus, which was indicative of poor predictive control rather than lags in the control system. We suggest that horizontal eye movements may be a sensitive indicator of more general motor deficits during childhood development.

The contribution of vision and proprioception to judgements of finger proximity.

We sought to determine whether an increase in judged egocentric distance created by increasing vergence-specified distance would be negated when participants pointed at their own finger. It was found that ocular position dominates limb proprioception in the judgement of finger distance in the sagittal plane when vision is available. In contrast, an increase in perceived egocentric distance was largely attenuated by the presence of limb proprioception in reduced visual cue conditions. We conclude that the relative contribution of vergence to perceived distance depends upon the strength of the vergence effort signal when there are other cues present. Furthermore, if the distance percept includes a major contribution from retinal cues, then the visual component will dominate the limb proprioception component. If the visual component is largely determined by vergence information, limb proprioception will make a significant contribution and actually dominate when the vergence effort signal is weak. The results extend previous studies that have found a similar relationship between ocular position and limb proprioception in the perception of a finger's location in the coronal plane.

Improving vision: neural compensation for optical defocus.

Anecdotal reports abound of vision improving in myopia after a period of time without refractive correction. We explored whether this effect is due to an increased tolerance of blur or whether it reflects a genuine improvement in vision. Our results clearly demonstrated a marked improvement in the ability to detect and recognize letters following prolonged exposure to optical defocus. We ensured that ophthalmic change did not occur, and thus the phenomenon must be due to a neural compensation for the defocus condition. A second set of experiments measured contrast sensitivity and found a decrease in sensitivity to mid-range (5-25 cycles deg-1) spatial frequencies following exposure to optical defocus. The results of the two experiments may be explained by the unmasking of low contrast, high spatial frequency information via a two-stage process: (1) the pattern of relative channel outputs is maintained during optical defocus by the depression of mid-range spatial frequency channels; (2) channel outputs are pooled prior to the production of the final percept. The second set of experiments also provided some evidence of inter-ocular transfer, indicating that the adaptation process is occurring at binocular sites in the cortex.

Synaesthesia in the normal limb.

We explored the degree to which vision may alter kinaesthetic perception by asking participants to view their hand through a prism, introducing different horizontal deviations, while trying to align their fingers above and below a thin table. When the visual image of one hand was displaced this overwhelmed kinaesthetic judgements and participants reliably reported that they felt their limbs were aligned, even when they were laterally mis-aligned by as much as 10 cm. This effect, however, was mediated by 'visual capture' and when the task was attempted in a darkened room with limb position indicated by an LED taped to the finger, kinaesthesis dominated and participants reported that the LED seemed to become detached from their finger tip. In both light and dark conditions the finger was clearly visible and only the background detail was extinguished. Hence, in perceiving limb position, it appears that we believe in what we see, rather than in what we feel, when the visual background is rich, and in what we feel when the visual background is sparse.

Looking at the task in hand: vergence eye movements and perceived size.

A retinal afterimage of the hand changes size when the same unseen hand is moved backwards and forwards in darkness. We demonstrate that arm movements per se are not sufficient to cause a size change and that vergence eye movements are a necessary and sufficient condition for the presence of the illusory size change. We review previous literature to illustrate that changing limb position in the dark alters vergence angle and we explain the illusion via this mechanism. A discussion is provided on why altering limb position causes a change in vergence and we speculate on the underlying mechanisms.

Virtual environments for the rehabilitation of disorders of attention and movement.

The incidence of perceptual-motor disorders arising from stroke is steadily increasing in the population of Europe and USA. This chapter sought to define the role that virtual environments may have in designing remedial programmes for rehabilitation following stroke in the areas of attentional retraining and the reacquisition of perceptuo-motor skills. Principles for the structure of guided learning were identified and emphasis placed on the need to identify when and how virtual environments technology can introduce added value to the therapy situation.

Anticipating arrival: is the tau margin a specious theory?

A critical review is presented of previous studies that have examined the use of the tau margin (tau m) in the temporal judgment of arrival in natural contexts. This body of evidence is frequently cited as providing strong support for the use of Tau m for interceptive timing. Critical flaws are demonstrated in either the analysis or interpretation of many of these studies. It is suggested that temporal control in a number of these experiments could have been effected using a relative distance estimate (zeta ratio). Results are also presented and discussed that conflict with the tau m control hypothesis. It is concluded that although the tau m hypothesis provides an appealing account of interceptive timing, its broad acceptance is unwarranted on the evidence available.