Control of binocular gaze in a high-precision manual task

- Gaze precedes the hand when performing a manual task requiring high precision.
- Microsaccade amplitude adapts to the distance between the relevant objects.
- Vergence and version are not coordinated during microsaccades.
- Vergence and version are coordinated when instructed to make small saccades.

We investigated the precision of binocular gaze control while observers performed a high-precision manual movement, which involved hitting a target hole in a plate with a hand-held needle. Binocular eye movements and the 3D-position of the needle tip were tracked. In general the observers oriented their gaze to the target before they reached it with the needle. The amplitude of microsaccades scaled with the distance of the needle tip. We did not find evidence for the coordination of version and vergence during microsaccades which could be expected if those movements displaced gaze between the needle and the target hole. In a control experiment observers executed small saccades between marks on a slanted plane. Even when the observers executed saccades as small as the microsaccades in the needle experiment, we observed a coordinated displacement of the point of gaze on the horizontal and depth axis. Our results show that the characteristics of eye movements such as the frequency and amplitude of microsaccades are adapted online to the task demands. However, a coordinated control of version and vergence in small saccades is only observed if a movement of gaze on a slanted trajectory is explicitly instructed.