Visual Decisions in Natural Action

Natural behavior reveals the way that gaze serves the needs of the current task, and the complex cognitive control mechanisms that are involved. It has become increasingly clear that even the simplest actions involve complex decision processes that depend on an interaction of visual information, knowledge of the current environment, and the intrinsic costs and benefits of actions choices. I will explore these ideas in the context of walking in natural terrain, where we are able to recover the 3D structure of the visual environment. We show that subjects choose flexible paths that depend on the flatness of the terrain over the next few steps. Subjects trade off flatness with straightness of their paths towards the goal, indicating a nuanced trade-off between stability and energetic costs on both the time scale of the next step and longer-range constraints.