Visuomotor Tracking Tasks With Delayed Pursuit and Escape

Virtual stick balancing (VSB) is a manual visuomotor tracking task that involves interplay between a human and a computer in which the movements are programmed to resemble those of balancing a stick at the fingertip. Since time delays and random perturbations (“noise”) are intrinsic properties of this task, we modeled VSB as a delayed pursuit-escape process: the target movements are described by a simple random walk and those movements controlled by the computer mouse by a delayed random walk biased towards the target. As subjects become more skilled, a stereotyped and recurring pursuit‐escape pattern develops in which the mouse pursues the target until it overtakes it, causing the target to move in a different direction, followed, after a lag, by the pursing mouse. The delayed pursuit-escape random walk model captured the qualitative nature of this tracking task and provided insights into why this tracking task always fails at some point in time, even for the most expert subjects.

[1]  John G. Milton,et al.  Balancing with Vibration: A Prelude for “Drift and Act” Balance Control , 2009, PloS one.

[2]  Ralf Engbert,et al.  Modeling the control of fixational eye movements with neurophysiological delays. , 2007, Physical review letters.

[3]  J. Stern,et al.  Eye movements and blinks: their relationship to higher cognitive processes. , 1989, International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology.

[4]  Ramesh Balasubramaniam,et al.  Motor Learning Characterized by Changing Lévy Distributions , 2009, PloS one.

[5]  Ohira,et al.  Delayed stochastic systems , 2000, Physical review. E, Statistical physics, plasmas, fluids, and related interdisciplinary topics.

[6]  Christian W. Eurich,et al.  Visuomotor tracking on a computer screen - an experimental paradigm to study the dynamics of motor control , 2004, Neurocomputing.

[7]  John G. Milton,et al.  Neural control on multiple time scales: Insights from human stick balancing , 2006 .

[8]  Andrew D. Straw,et al.  Vision Egg: an Open-Source Library for Realtime Visual Stimulus Generation , 2008, Frontiers Neuroinformatics.

[9]  Christian W. Eurich,et al.  STATE-DEPENDENT NOISE AND HUMAN BALANCE CONTROL , 2004 .

[10]  John G Milton,et al.  On-off intermittency in a human balancing task. , 2002, Physical review letters.

[11]  John G. Milton,et al.  Unstable dynamical systems: Delays, noise and control , 2008 .

[12]  Juan Luis Cabrera,et al.  Controlling instability with delayed antagonistic stochastic dynamics , 2005 .

[13]  Klaus Pawelzik,et al.  Self-Organized Critical Noise Amplification in Human Closed Loop Control , 2007, Frontiers Comput. Neurosci..

[14]  Khashayar Pakdaman,et al.  Transient regime duration in continuous-time neural networks with delay , 1998 .

[15]  Si Wu,et al.  Compensating time delays with neural predictions: are predictions sensory or motor? , 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[16]  R. Miall,et al.  Visuomotor tracking with delayed visual feedback , 1985, Neuroscience.

[17]  Romi Nijhawan,et al.  Visual prediction: Psychophysics and neurophysiology of compensation for time delays , 2008, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[18]  P. Nahin.  Chases and Escapes: The Mathematics of Pursuit and Evasion , 2012 .

[19]  R. Miall,et al.  Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1007/s002219900286 RESEARCH ARTICLE , 2022 .

[20]  Scott T. Grafton,et al.  Forward modeling allows feedback control for fast reaching movements , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[21]  Mitsuo Kawato,et al.  Internal models for motor control and trajectory planning , 1999, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[22]  John G. Milton,et al.  Delayed Random Walks: Investigating the Interplay Between Delay and Noise , 2009 .

[23]  Stefan Schaal,et al.  Forward models in visuomotor control. , 2002, Journal of neurophysiology.

[24]  Y. Sugiyama,et al.  Traffic jams without bottlenecks—experimental evidence for the physical mechanism of the formation of a jam , 2008 .

[25]  A. Longtin,et al.  Small delay approximation of stochastic delay differential equations , 1999 .

[26]  Klaus Pawelzik,et al.  Optimal Control Yields Power Law Behavior , 2005, ICANN.

[27]  Juan Luis Cabrera,et al.  Human stick balancing: tuning Lèvy flights to improve balance control. , 2004, Chaos.

[28]  Toru Ohira,et al.  Group chase and escape , 2009, Theoretical Biology.

[29]  L. Glass,et al.  Delayed visual feedback and movement control in Parkinson's disease , 1990, Experimental Neurology.

[30]  Nigel Stepp,et al.  Anticipation in feedback-delayed manual tracking of a chaotic oscillator , 2009, Experimental Brain Research.