Cognitive load affects gaze dynamics during real-world tasks

Martinez-Cedillo, Astrid Priscilla; Gavrila, N.; Mishra, Ashwani Kumar; Geangu, Elena; Foulsham, Tom · 2025 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1007/s00221-025-07037-4

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Summary

This study investigates how cognitive load influences gaze dynamics during complex, real-world sequential tasks. While previous research has established that gaze patterns in everyday activities like tea-making are highly targeted and efficient, the cognitive resources required to maintain this control remain poorly understood. The authors address this gap by examining whether a secondary cognitive task disrupts the specific gaze behaviors—such as look-ahead fixations and distractor rejection—typically observed in healthy adults performing these tasks. The experiment involved 25 healthy adults who performed two everyday tasks: making a cup of tea and making a sandwich. Participants wore a head-mounted eye-tracker to record gaze movements. To manipulate cognitive load, participants concurrently performed a verbal working memory task, counting backwards either by threes (high load) or by ones (low load). The study utilized a within-subjects design, counterbalancing task order and load condition. Gaze data were analyzed by categorizing fixations as relevant or irrelevant to the task and by calculating the "eye-hand span," which measures the time difference between fixating an object and manually interacting with it. The results demonstrated that high cognitive load significantly impaired task performance and altered gaze behavior. Participants completed tasks more slowly under high-load conditions compared to low-load conditions. Crucially, high load led to increased visual distraction; participants fixated on irrelevant objects significantly more often when counting by threes. Furthermore, the eye-hand span was reduced under high load. In low-load conditions, participants typically fixated objects 0.5 seconds before manual contact, allowing for planned actions. Under high load, this lead time decreased, and participants were more likely to fixate objects after or simultaneously with hand contact, indicating a breakdown in proactive gaze planning. These findings indicate that the efficient gaze control observed in naturalistic tasks is not resource-free but relies on cognitive mechanisms shared with general attentional processes. The study supports load theory, suggesting that when working memory resources are taxed, the ability to filter out irrelevant visual information and maintain top-down gaze guidance is compromised. This work extends previous neuropsychological findings on patients with action disorganization syndrome to healthy populations, demonstrating that even minor increases in cognitive demand can disrupt the sophisticated coordination of eyes and hands in daily life. The results highlight the importance of considering cognitive load in models of active vision and suggest that gaze control mechanisms are deeply intertwined with executive attention.

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Topics

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• cognitive
• eye movements scanning
• mental demand