Visuomotor tracking with delayed visual feedback.

A rhesus monkey and five human subjects used a hand-held joystick to track unpredictable continuously moving targets. Both monkey and human respond by making discrete ("step-and-hold") corrections of positional error, at an average frequency of 1.33 and 2.26 movements/second, respectively. By delaying visual feedback of joystick position, we could reduce these frequencies in a predictable manner. These results imply that the primate visuomotor system probably does not operate as a "sampled-data mechanism" governed by an asynchronous clock, but that inevitable delays in visuomotor feedback control determine the frequency of corrective movements.