The Influence of Uncertainty and Premovement Visual Information on Manual Aiming

Target-aiming studies in which premovement visual information is manipulated suggest that when vision is occluded, a brief visual representation of the target environment may be used to guide movement. The purpose of this work was to determine if the internal representation contains information about the whole movement environment or just specific information about the position of a single target goal. Two experiments were conducted in which we manipulated both target uncertainty and the visual information available before and during a target-aiming movement. Radial error differences between visual conditions and the independence of the vision and uncertainty manipulations support the hypothesis that subjects form a representation of the overall movement environment.