Information Difference of Transfer Entropies between Head Motion and Eye Movement Indicates a Proxy of Driving

Abstract

Visual scanning is achieved via head motion and gaze movement for visual information acquisition and cognitive processing, which plays a critical role in undertaking common sensorimotor tasks such as driving. The coordination of the head and eyes is an important human behavior to make a key contribution to goal-directed visual scanning and sensorimotor driving. In this paper, we basically investigate the two most common patterns in eye–head coordination: “head motion earlier than eye movement” and “eye movement earlier than head motion”. We utilize bidirectional transfer entropies between head motion and eye movements to determine the existence of these two eye–head coordination patterns. Furthermore, we propose a unidirectional information difference to assess which pattern predominates in head–eye coordination. Additionally, we have discovered a significant correlation between the normalized unidirectional information difference and driving performance. This result not only indicates the influence of eye–head coordination on driving behavior from a computational perspective but also validates the practical significance of our approach utilizing transfer entropy for quantifying eye–head coordination.