Eye movements during visuospatial judgements

Abstract

The goal of the current research was to determine whether eye movements reflect different underlying cognitive processes associated with visuospatial relation judgements. Ten participants made three different judgements regarding the position of a dot in relation to a bar; an above/below judgement, a near/far judgement, and a precise distance estimation. The results highlight similarities between above/below and near/far visuospatial judgements; specifically, such binary judgements were fast, reflexive, and did not require precise distance computation. In contrast, estimating distance was comparatively cognitively demanding and required precise distance computation, as evidenced through distinct scan paths. The eye movement data provide significant insight into the cognitive processes underlying visuospatial judgements, showing aspects of visuospatial processing that are similar, as well as those that differ between tasks.

Keywords:

• Visuospatial
• Cognitive processes
• Relation judgements
• Eye movements

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a UK Economic and Social Research Council research studentship to KM. This research was also supported by a UK Economic and Social Research Council research grant (RES 000 22 3398) to SL.

Notes

¹This portion of the procedure was adopted to ensure methodological consistency with other experiments conducted as part of a PhD thesis.

²It must be noted that participants used decimals to estimate distance on 13% of trials. Thus, although participants were permitted to type in distance estimates as decimals, on the majority of trials they did not.