Fitts' law holds for pointing movements under conditions of restricted visual feedback

Abstract

Fitts' law robustly predicts the time required to move rapidly to a target. However, it is unclear whether Fitts' law holds for visually guided actions under visually restricted conditions. We tested whether Fitts' law applies under various conditions of visual restriction and compared pointing movements in each condition. Ten healthy participants performed four pointing movement tasks under different visual feedback conditions, including full-vision (FV), no-hand-movement (NM), no-target-location (NT), and no-vision (NV) feedback conditions. The movement times (MTs) for each task exhibited highly linear relationships with the index of difficulty (r(2)>.96). These findings suggest that pointing movements follow Fitts' law even when visual feedback is restricted or absent. However, the MTs and accuracy of pointing movements decreased for difficult tasks involving visual restriction.