Fork in the road: How self-efficacy related to walking across terrain influences gaze behavior and path choice

Decisions about where to move occur throughout the day and are essential to life. Different movements may present different challenges and affect the likelihood of achieving a goal. Certain choices may have unintended consequences, some of which may cause harm and bias the decision. Movement decisions rely on a person gathering necessary visual information via shifts in gaze. Here we sought to understand what influences this information-seeking gaze behavior. Participants chose between walking across one of two paths that consisted of terrain images found in either hiking or urban environments. We manipulated the number and type of terrain of each path, which altered the amount of available visual information. We recorded gaze behavior during the approach to the paths and had participants rate the confidence in their ability to walk across each terrain type (i.e., self-efficacy) as though it was real. Participants did not direct gaze more to the path with greater visual information, regardless of how we quantified information. Rather, we show that a person's perception of their motor abilities predicts how they visually explore the environment with their eyes as well as their choice of action. The greater the self-efficacy in walking across one path, the more they directed gaze to it and the more likely they chose to walk across it.