Humans adapt their anticipatory eye movements to the volatility of visual motion properties

Chloé Pasturel, Anna Montagnini, Laurent U. Perrinet

Abstract: Author summary Understanding how humans adapt to changing environments to make judgments or plan motor responses based on time-varying sensory information is crucial for psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Current theories for how we deal with the environment’s uncertainty, that is, in response to the introduction of some randomness change, mostly rely on the behavior at equilibrium, long after after a change. Here, we show that in the more ecological case where the context switches at random times all along the experiment, an adaptation to this volatility can be performed online. In particular, we show in two behavioral experiments that humans can adapt to such volatility at the early sensorimotor level, through their anticipatory eye movements, but also at a higher cognitive level, through explicit ratings. Our results suggest that humans (and future artificial systems) can use much richer adaptive strategies than previously assumed.