Amplitude and Width Manipulations in Fitts' Paradigm: Comment on Heath et al. (2011) and Heath et al. (2016)

Heath, Weiler, Marriott, Elliott, and Binstead ( 2011 ) and Heath, Samani, Tremblay, and Elliott ( 2016 ) have claimed that there are dissociable movement times for amplitude and width manipulations in the Fitts' paradigm. This may to some extent be true, but the Heath et al. ( 2011 ) and Heath et al. ( 2016 ) data do not support that contention, as shown in this comment. It is shown that data from the research of Heath et al. is not in the range of index of difficulty where ongoing visual control would be used and hence their fits of data to Fitts' law are spurious. The data of Heath et al. ( 2011 ) for arm movements and for the primary eye saccade submovements of Heath et al. ( 2016 ) are well correlated by the ballistic movement time equation of Hoffmann ( 1981 ) and Gan and Hoffmann ( 1988 ). When the ballistic equation is used to model data for constant amplitude and constant target width conditions, the effects of the amplitude and width manipulations disappear. Other research indicates that the independent effects of movement amplitude occur due to changes in the time for the distance-covering phase of the movement.