Modulating color cue effectiveness: The role of active selection in visuomotor adaptation

Motor control research highlights the varying efficacy of cues in conveying behavioral context information (Howard et al., 2013). Notably, studies on visuomotor adaptation reveal the ineffectiveness of color cues in cue-dependent contextual saccadic adaptation (Azadi and Hardwood, 2014) and anticipatory smooth pursuit eye movements (aSPEM) (Carneiro-Morita et al., 2021), though the reasons remain elusive. This study explores how participants' active cue selection influences effectiveness in a visual motion tracking task. Participants tracked a colored dot (Green or Red) at the screen center, which disappeared for 300 ms, reappeared, and moved horizontally (15°/s) right or left. The probability of rightward motion was color-dependent (e.g., P(right|Green) = 0.75, P(right|Red) = 0.25). aSPEM was analyzed in two conditions: In the first condition, dot color choice was predetermined by a Bernoulli distribution Ber(0.5), no participant action needed before oculomotor tracking. In the second condition, participants actively chose colors, alternating fairly between Green and Red. Results show active cue selection significantly influences cue valence: In the first condition, no effect on anticipatory velocity (P > 0.05) across direction-bias blocks. In the second condition , a significant difference emerged (P < 0.001), with higher anticipatory eye velocity for greater motion probability in a specific direction, depending on cue color. Findings demonstrate efficient integration of color cue-conditional probability into oculomotor anticipation when actively selected. In conclusion, our study reveals the unexplored role of active selection in modulating informative color cue effectiveness for aSPEM in direction-biased contexts. Further work is required to discern whether this phenomenon reflects a general attentional mechanism or is specifically tied to motor agency in cue selection.