Gaze behavior and visuospatial attention in compensatory stepping responses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Compensatory stepping reactions were evoked in healthy young and older adults by sudden, unpredictable movement of a large platform. Visual behavior was examined when modulating the response to clear a high frontal obstacle, stepping to a target, or both, and switches in attention were inferred by performance on a secondary visuomotor pursuit task. Results suggest that a 'remembered' spatial map of the surrounding environment is predominately used to guide rapid stepping reactions in young and older adults. It has been well established that postural control requires cognitive resources; however, the attentional demand of triggered balance responses executed amid environmental constraints is unknown. This thesis sought to determine: (1) how and when visuospatial information of the environment is obtained; (2) whether this is related to switches of attention; (3) the associated attentional demand of accommodating compensatory stepping to environmental constraints; (4) how this changes with healthy ageing. Dual-task and balance-only trials were compared to further examine visual and attentional behavior. The frequency of downward gaze deviations increased without the secondary task, but a substantial portion of trials still did not include downward gaze shifts. The findings further indicate that remembered spatial information is commonly used to guide rapid perturbation-evoked stepping movements, even in the absence of competing demands for visual attention. These results indicate that young and older adults are able to guide compensatory stepping reactions using remembered spatial information under both static and more dynamic and unpredictable conditions, and that attention switching is not related to efforts to acquire online visual information. In the final study, a dynamic environment was employed to further challenge the capacity to 'remember' environmental features. Subjects stood surrounded by four obstacles that moved intermittently in an unpredictable sequence. Visual scanning and fixation of the obstacles occurred prior to, but never after, perturbation onset in both young and older adults. At step initiation, both young and older adults gaze was directed ahead of any obstacles and eventual swing-foot landing site, and both groups were able to avoid obstacle contact on the first step.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".