Action Affordance Affects Proximal and Distal Goal-oriented Planning

Visual attention is mainly goal-directed and allocated based on the upcoming action to be performed. However, it is unclear how far this feature of gaze behavior generalizes in more naturalistic settings. The present study investigates active inference processes revealed by eye movements during interaction with familiar and novel tools with two levels of realism of the action affordance. In a between-subject design, a cohort of participants interacted with a VR controller in a low realism environment; another performed the task with an interaction setup that allowed differentiated hand and finger movements in a high-realism environment. We investigated the differences in odds of fixations and their eccentricity towards the tool parts before action initiation. The results show that participants fixate more on the tool’s effector part before action initiation when asked to use the tool and during interaction with unfamiliar tools. The spatial viewing bias on the tool reveals early fixations are influenced by the task and the familiarity of the tools. Our findings suggest that fixations are made in a task-oriented way to plan the intended action well before action initiation. With more realistic action affordances, more fixations were allocated toward the tool handle. We hypothesize that these fixations are made towards the proximal goal of planning the grasp even though the perceived action on the tools is identical for both experimental setups. Taken together, proximal and distal goal-oriented planning is contextualized to the realism of action/interaction afforded by an environment.