A New Evaluation Method for Eye-Head Coordination: Usefulness of Coefficient of the Sharing Ratio Based on Pursuit Task's Sharing Ratio

Abstract

Statement of the problem: Vision is crucial for obtaining information about the environment, and eye-head coordination plays a key role in visual processing. Previous studies have struggled to compare eye-head coordination across different tasks due to significant individual differences. This study addresses the challenge of relative comparisons by introducing a new evaluation method.

Methodology: We introduced the coefficient of the sharing ratio based on the pursuit task (CoSRP) to compare eye-head coordination across different tasks. Ten healthy individuals performed four tasks: pursuit, saccade, visual search, and classification. Eye and head movements were recorded using an eye tracker (TalkEye Lite) and an accelerometer. The sharing ratios were calculated, and the CoSRP was derived to assess differences between tasks.

Results: The results showed that the CoSRP was significantly smaller in the classification task than in the saccade and visual search tasks, indicating that the CoSRP may reflect the visual characteristics of each task.

Conclusion: The CoSRP provides a useful index for comparing eye-head coordination across different tasks and may offer insights into task-specific visual strategies. Future studies should include larger participant samples and explore CoSRP in populations with neurodegenerative diseases (e.g. Parkinson's Disease) and children with developmental disabilities to find their visual characteristics.