Is Fitts’ Law Continuous in Discrete Aiming?

Rita Sleimen-Malkoun, Jean-Jacques Temprado, Raoul Huys, Viktor Jirsa and Eric Berton

PLOS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, issue 7, 1-6

Abstract: The lawful continuous linear relation between movement time and task difficulty (i.e., index of difficulty; ID) in a goal-directed rapid aiming task (Fitts’ law) has been recently challenged in reciprocal performance. Specifically, a discontinuity was observed at critical ID and was attributed to a transition between two distinct dynamic regimes that occurs with increasing difficulty. In the present paper, we show that such a discontinuity is also present in discrete aiming when ID is manipulated via target width (experiment 1) but not via target distance (experiment 2). Fitts’ law’s discontinuity appears, therefore, to be a suitable indicator of the underlying functional adaptations of the neuro-muscular-skeletal system to task properties/requirements, independently of reciprocal or discrete nature of the task. These findings open new perspectives to the study of dynamic regimes involved in discrete aiming and sensori-motor mechanisms underlying the speed-accuracy trade-off.

Date: 2012
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0041190 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 41190&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0041190

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0041190

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).