The distinction matters because feeling in control depends on anticipating what will happen next. When disturbances were random, participants focused closer to the spaceship and performed immediate corrections. When disturbances followed a pattern, they looked farther out and adjusted before problems arose, preserving performance and a strong sense of control. Invisible or unpredictable disruptions undermined both performance and that internal sense of agency, showing how tightly linked perception, action, and judgment can be.
For anyone interested in human potential, these findings point toward practical ways to design training, interfaces, and environments that support adaptive control. Tools that encourage anticipatory scanning or make predictable patterns legible could strengthen performance and confidence in complex tasks. Follow the full article to see the experiments and data that connect eye behavior to how people stay effective and feel empowered in uncertain situations.
Abstract
This series of studies investigated the interplay between the Sense of Control, continuous action control, and eye-movement behavior in dynamic and uncertain environments. Across three experiments, we used a custom-designed environment combined with eye-tracking to examine how action goal pursuit and visual strategies were adapted to deal with motor perturbations of varying predictability. Participants steered a spaceship, avoiding walls and obstacles while contending with random input noise and predictable horizontal drift. We found that changes in fixation distances to a reference point, the spaceship, indicated the type of action control employed. Input noise was associated with decreasing distances in fixations already close to the spaceship, addressing immediate demands for maintaining the spaceship’s trajectory. In contrast, fixations allocated within the outer vicinity of the spaceship featured even longer distances in response to drift, suggesting visual exploration and proactive planning. That is, reactive strategies of action control were characterized by immediate responses to unpredictable disturbances, whereas proactive strategies reflected anticipatory adjustments to predictable changes. Furthermore, judgments about the own Sense of Control were closely tied to participants’ ability to anticipate and adapt to environmental features. Invisible perturbations led to control loss and reduced task performance, but predictable perturbations allowed participants to maintain a high Sense of Control and still successfully solve the task. These results highlight how cognitive processes and sensorimotor control interact to navigate uncertain environments by flexibly balancing reactive and proactive strategies of action control.
