Werven, R. van (Rachel) (2010) What information from the peripheral visual field is used during walking through a complex environment? R. thesis, Human Movement Sciences.
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Abstract
Many studies have highlighted the fact that the peripheral visual field plays an important role during locomotion. However, as of yet it is unclear what information exactly is sampled from the peripheral visual field. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to find out what information is sampled from the peripheral visual field. Eight healthy young subjects participated in this experiment, who had to walk a total of 64 trials through a cluttered environment with 36 traffic pylons towards a specified end goal. There were four visual conditions: full vision, lateral restriction, horizontal restriction and finally both lateral and horizontal restriction. The gaze behaviour of the subjects was measured with a mobile eye tracker. These fixations were categorised in four categories: Goal, Path, Obstacles and locations Elsewhere. By means of a Repeated Measures ANOVA, the effects of horizontal occlusion (HO) and lateral occlusion (LO) on the number of fixations, fixation duration, and proportion fixation time on the four environmental features were measured. The results showed that HO resulted in a significant increase in the number of fixations on the Path and Obstacles, and HO also resulted in a significant increase in the duration of fixations on the Path, Goal, Obstacles and locations Elsewhere. Further, HO resulted in a significant increase of proportion fixation time on the Path, but to a reduction in the proportion fixation time spent on the Goal. It was interesting to see that the path and obstacle fixations were influenced in a different way by the (horizontal) occlusion. Finally, significant Interaction effects were found of the proportion fixation time spent on the Path and locations Elsewhere. No significant effects of LO were found. The most important finding was that it appears that path information is very important during walking through a complex environment, whereas when full vision was available, the goal information appeared to be the most important source of information. Taken together, it can be concluded that goal fixations are used primarily for navigational control, and that this is possible because path (and to a lesser extent obstacle) information is extracted from the periphery during walking through a complex environment.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Thesis) |
|---|---|
| Supervisor name: | Otter, Dr. A.R. den |
| Faculty: | Medical Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jun 2020 10:58 |
| Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2020 10:58 |
| URI: | https://umcg.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/1887 |
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