Adaptive walking relies on proactive gaze behaviour to plan foot placement and maintain stability. This study examined how mental workload and task complexity affect gaze behaviour and gait biomechanics during a precision target-stepping task in healthy young adults. We also quantified the frequency of cross-stepping during the experimental task. Twenty-three participants (18-23 years) walked along an L-shaped pathway containing raised stepping targets under single-task (ST) and dual-task (DT) conditions. Targets had four different layouts to create high and low difficulty conditions. Eye movements were recorded using mobile eye-tracking, and gait kinematics were recorded via motion capture. Compared with ST, DT walking produced slower walking speeds, longer stance times, and reduced velocity between stepping targets, indicating a more inefficient gait strategy. In addition, eye-tracking analyses revealed fewer and shorter fixations on task-relevant targets and a greater number of fixations directed toward task-irrelevant areas and, saccadic amplitudes were reduced despite increased outside fixations, suggesting a breakdown in visual exploration between proximal and distal regions of the walkway. In ST conditions, cross-stepping was more frequent than in DT. These findings indicate that increased mental workload compromises proactive gaze behaviour, likely through working-memory and attentional limitations that disrupt feedforward gait planning. Contrary to expectation, cross-stepping occurred more often during ST than DT walking, suggesting that in this population cross-stepping may not be a maladaptive strategy. Overall, these results highlight the cognitive demands of adaptive walking even in young, low-risk individuals and underscore the importance of preserving visual-motor coordination under cognitive stress.
Russo et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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