Visuomotor control in goal-directed movements

This chapter explains visuomotor control in goal-directed movements. It outlines some of the experimental approaches that have been undertaken in attempting to understand the mechanisms involved in visuomotor control. This research has primarily been directed at understanding the time course of the processes that occurs between the reception of visual information and the issuing of a motor command. Some of the complexities involved in the production of visually guided movements are described. The chapter presents an experiment in which the temporal and spatial relationship between eye and arm movements is examined in a simple motor task, both at an unskilled and skilled level of performance. This experiment serves to describe characteristics typical of actual eye and arm movements and to outline some control processes that have been inferred from different levels of analysis. In addition, the chapter presents the summary of an experiment, which is designed to ascertain the temporal constraints governing the utilization of visual information prior to and during a movement. This experiment helps in illustrating both the parallel and serial processing capacities of the visuomotor control system.