Relating Eye Activity Measures to Human Controller Remnant Characteristics

This study attempts to partially explain the characteristics of the human perceptual remnant, following Levison’s representation of the remnant as an equivalent observation noise. Eye activity parameters are recorded using an eye tracker in two compensatory tracking tasks in which the visual information is presented using either a first or second-order visual stimulus. Differences in the two conditions between remnant characteristics, eye activity measures and human operator model parameters are analyzed, using preliminary data from three subjects. Preliminary results show that the second-order visual stimulus introduces changes in both eye activity and remnant model parameters. Although high correlations are observed between remnant gain and blink frequency, between remnant break frequency and eye opening amplitude, and between remnant power and pupil diameter, a definitive conclusion about the perceptual remnant - eye activity characteristics relation cannot be drawn due to the small sample size of the obtained data. This preliminary study is a first step in identifying possible physiological parameters that affect the perceptual human remnant.