Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How humans engage in goal-directed behavior within dynamic environments is still not completely understood. Pursuing goals in an environment that is characterized by constant unpredictable changes might be possible through the interaction of multiple layers of action control. A cognitive layer exerts situational control by selecting action intentions, while a motor control layer is responsible for execution. The motor layer informs the cognitive level, about disturbances during execution of these action intentions. We present an experimental dynamic environment, combining motor control manipulation and eye-tracking to investigate visuomotor grounding of cognitive processes. Our results indicate that inefficient motor control prompts strategic shifts in eye- movement behavior, with fixations closer to a reference point under moderate motor noise and further away under increased noise. We further find fixational and smooth pursuit eye movements that can be directly mapped to pursued action intentions. These findings shed light on the changes in action selection caused by noise in the motor system and can be used in a next step to investigate moment-to-moment changes in the pursuit of action intentions under inefficient motor control.