The Influence of Walking Speed on Gaze Behaviors

In this experiment, three cats walked freely in four different conditions (walking on a flat surface in the dark, walking on a flat surface in the light, along a horizontal ladder, and a stone-cluttered pathway) while gaze was recorded. Four gaze behaviors were identified based upon head and eye velocity parameters relative to the walking velocity of the cat: constant gaze, fixation, gaze shift away, and gaze shift toward (see Methods). The objective of the study was to determine whether speed influences the phase that these gaze behaviors occur, where phase is defined as the degree from 0-360 of the step cycle. In the step cycle, 0 degrees is defined as the start of swing of the right forelimb. Additionally, speed’s influence on the uniformity of gaze behaviors to the step cycle was investigated in the three cats. The cats performed complex walking tasks, or conditions, as well as simple tasks to determine if speed has a greater effect on gaze behavior timing when walking terrain was difficult. I hypothesized that 1) gaze-stride coordination would be influenced by speed, 2) faster steps would show improved gaze behavior uniformity between subjects, and 3) fast steps during complex walking tasks would show further improvement of gaze behavior uniformity between subjects. To, this end, recorded steps were first split into fast and slow steps based upon step duration parameters (see Methods). These fast and slow steps were confirmed as significantly different from one another using a one-way ANOVA test on a linear mixed effects model (Table 3). Then, a linear mixed effects model was made per walking condition to account for subject effects, and a two-way ANOVA test was performed on the model to compare the phases of gaze behaviors to the speed when they occurred. It was found that speed does not influence the phase that gaze behaviors occur, except for walking on a flat surface in the dark. However, post-hoc tests could not be run to determine which behaviors were affected by speed. (see Discussion). The insignificance of speed suggests that speed is accounted for by the visual center responsible for the control of gaze behavior (see Discussion). Aside from speed’s influence on phase, uniformity was examined using standard deviation (Figure 3 ). It was found that faster steps tend to adopt a “gaze stepping” behavior described in a previous paper (Rivers et al. 2014). In future studies, it would be useful to increase the number of subjects for a similar experiment to improve the robustness of the results to determine if the relationship between speed and gaze behaviors reported in this paper is accurately depicted.