Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The complexity and unpredictability of a situation might contribute to how much an individual feels in control of their actions. Goal-directed behaviour tailored to different situations is enabled through a hierarchy of situated action control combining cognitive and sensorimotor control processes. We use eye-tracking to investigate the grounding of cognitive processes in the sensorimotor system. Our assumption is that different degrees of perceived control trigger cognitive states that are reflected in eye-movement behaviour. Utilizing a dynamic experimental environment, we investigate whether complexity and uncertainty of the situation are top-down processed into fixational eye movements. The distance to a reference point is affected by environmental complexity in all fixations; however environmental uncertainty is only incorporated in fixations that guide motor control. We discuss that these fixations are only executed under high sense of control when there are enough cognitive resources left to top-down process the environmental uncertainty into gaze allocation.