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.

中文翻译：

---

追踪心灵的眼睛：虚拟视觉运动导航期间灵长类动物的注视行为反映了信念动态。

为了采取最佳行动，我们经常需要维护和更新对无法直接观察到的变量的信念。为了理解这种信念更新背后的原理，我们需要工具来从自然行为中揭示受试者的信念动态。我们测试了眼球运动是否可以用于使用自然导航任务来推断受试者对潜在变量的信念。人类和猴子在虚拟环境中导航到记住的目标位置，该环境提供光流但缺乏明确的位置提示。我们观察到眼球运动似乎在持续跟踪目标位置，即使那里没有可见目标。准确的目标跟踪与提高任务表现有关，而抑制人类的眼球运动会损害导航精度。这些结果表明，注视动态在具有挑战性的视觉运动行为期间的动作选择中发挥着关键作用，并且可能作为了解受试者动态演变的内部信念的窗口。