Visual Control of Locomotion

Abstract

Locomotion is the most fundamental behavior of animals and people, since it is prerequisite for almost all other behavior. Perhaps for this reason, research into the scientific problem of how locomotion is possible is rather scarce. The ability to move around in the environment in a more or less predetermined way, is just taken for granted. Only since World War II the first attempts were made to describe technically advanced ways of locomotion, like aircraft steering and driving a car. From the start, two rather different directions have been taken. Scientists with an engineering background have tried to solve the problem in describing the human element in a man-vehicle system by a transfer function of input-to-output variables, without much concern about the process elements inside the human being. Starting with Gibson, another direction was taken by scientists taking perception as their point of departure. Sometimes very complex mathematical descriptions of the visual field during locomotion were developed, without much orientation towards the whole task of locomotion. Much research is still needed to develop an empirically based process-model of locomotion.