How Does Gaze Behaviour During Route Previewing Impact on Gait and Dual-Task Costs During Adaptive Walking

This project is a secondary analysis of data previously collected to understand how previewing effects gait and attentional loading during adaptive gait of older adults. Previous work (OSF reg DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/K7JD4) analysing gaze behaviour during adaptive walking found that previewing the walking route significantly decreased the number of task irrelevant gaze fixations and reduced cognitive and motor dual-task costs. Therefore the purpose of this analysis is to examine how gaze behaviour during the previewing phase of the task, specifically fixation distributions, fixation durations, and transitions between areas of interest predicts performance outcomes during dual-task walking. Previewing behaviour provides essential feedforward visual information that allows walkers to plan upcoming steps, anticipate constraints, and prepare corrective actions before reaching challenging regions of the walkway. When individuals spend more time fixating distal areas and transition their gaze strategically between regions, they are better able to form an accurate internal model of the path ahead. Conversely, reduced previewing whether through shorter fixation durations, fewer distal fixations, or fewer gaze transitions limits this advance planning and may force participants to rely more heavily on reactive, online corrections. Such reactive control is slower, more cognitively demanding, and often less stable, potentially resulting in more cross-steps, stepping errors, and greater difficulty maintaining gait efficiency under cognitive load. Dual-task conditions require participants to divide attention between walking and a concurrent cognitive task. Effective previewing may reduce the attentional demands of adaptive walking by establishing the necessary spatial information ahead of time, allowing cognitive resources to remain available for the secondary task. When previewing is reduced, participants must allocate more attention to monitoring the walkway as they go, leaving fewer resources for the cognitive task and increasing dual-task costs. This can manifest as slowed walking, reduced cognitive accuracy, or both. Therefore, examining previewing behaviour could provide insight into how individuals manage attentional resources during complex walking tasks and help understand individuals variability in dual-task performance.