Adaptive allocation of vision under competing task demands

Human behavior in natural tasks consists of an intricately coordinated dance of cognitive, perceptual, and motor activities. Although much research has progressed in understanding the nature of cognitive, perceptual, or motor processing in isolation or in highly constrained settings, few studies have sought to examine how these systems are coordinated in the context of executing complex behavior. Previous research has suggested that, in the course of visually guided reaching movements, the eye and hand are yoked, or linked in anonadaptivemanner. In thiswork,we report an experiment thatmanipulated thedemands that a taskplacedon themotor and visual systems, and then examined in detail the resulting changes in visuomotor coordination. We develop an ideal actor model that predicts the optimal coordination of vision andmotor control in our task. On the basis of the predictions of our model, we demonstrate that human performance in our experiment reflects an adaptive response to the varying costs imposed by our experimental manipula-tions. Our results stand in contrast to previous theories that have assumed a fixed controlmechanism for coordinating vision andmotor control in reaching behavior