Tracking the Mind’s Eye: Primate Gaze Behavior during Virtual Visuomotor Navigation Reflects Belief Dynamics

To take the best actions, we often need to maintain and update beliefs about variables that cannot be directly observed. To understand the principles underlying such belief updates, we need tools to uncover subjects’ belief dynamics from natural behavior. We tested whether eye movements could be used to infer subjects’ beliefs about latent variables using a naturalistic navigation task. Humans and monkeys navigated to a remembered goal location in a virtual environment that provided optic flow but lacked explicit position cues. We observed eye movements that appeared to continuously track the goal location even when no visible target was present there. Accurate goal tracking was associated with improved task performance, and inhibiting eye movements in humans impaired navigation precision. These results suggest that gaze dynamics play a key role in action selection during challenging visuomotor behaviors and may possibly serve as a window into the subject’s dynamically evolving internal beliefs. •Humans and monkeys virtually navigated to a memorized goal by integrating optic flow•Eye movements tracked the goal location as subjects steered toward it•Better goal tracking was associated with better navigation performance•Forcing humans to fixate impaired navigation precision Humans and animals constantly maintain and update beliefs about latent world states, but those belief dynamics are notoriously difficult to measure experimentally. Using a naturalistic task in which subjects navigated to a hidden goal in virtual reality, Lakshminarasimhan et al. demonstrate that this could be achieved by tracking eye movements.