THE RACER’S GAZE: VISUAL STRATEGY IN HIGH-SPEED SPORTS EXPERTISE
Otto Lappi, Jami Pekkanen, Aleksandra Krajnc, Lucas Iacono, Adrian Remonda, Eduardo Enrique Veas · 2024
Eye movements shape all visual input to the brain, making their understanding essential for studying perception and visual guidance in dynamic environments. Mobile eye tracking provides the opportunity to investigate active gaze in natural contexts. Research on expert performance indicates gaze coordination as a key feature of expertise. Sports are in many ways an ideal environment for studying how gaze strategies support skilled action: the expert can be allowed to perform the task in a natural manner, capturing authentic behavior, and still experts perform repeatably and often under extreme time constraints, allowing systematic measurement and analysis of performance.In this study, we systematically observed the visual strategy of an expert racing driver performing a domain-representative task. Synchronized gaze (eye movement and head pose), telemetry (control actions), and localization data from a high-grade simulator were combined into an integrated data set. Different ways to parametrize the data were then employed to address different sets of research questions: Where does the expert look? How are eye and head movements coordinated? How is this coordination timed with respect to locomotor actions? Where are specific gaze behaviors performed? Our purpose is to demonstrate how this kind of "cross examination" of the data - where all four classes questions are addressed simultaneously - offers a more complete picture of on rich, naturalistic eye movement behavior, thus complementing traditional experimental designs which impose predefined task constraints and conditions.