The sense of control (SoC) is the subjective feeling of being in control over an action, influenced by controllability, difficulty and feedback. However, it remains unclear how SoC is formed in multitasking scenarios. We conducted a study to analyze SoC and its impact on task-switching behavior in multitasking scenarios. Participants were required to perform two tasks in parallel while in control of one task at a time, requiring voluntary switching. We found that task-specific SoCs are influenced by the controllability and difficulty of each task. An overall SoC can be explained mainly by these task-specific SoCs. But, the overall SoC did not correlate with the frequency of task switches or the relative time spent on one task. Our analysis indicates that the SoC of a more control-demanding task has greater impact on the overall SoC and even affects the task-specific SoC of the other task, as well as task-switching behavior.

How humans engage in goal-directed behavior within dynamic environments is still not completely understood. Pursuing goals in an environment that is characterized by constant unpredictable changes might be possible through the interaction of multiple layers of action control. A cognitive layer exerts situational control by selecting action intentions, while a motor control layer is responsible for execution. The motor layer informs the cognitive level, about disturbances during execution of these action intentions. We present an experimental dynamic environment, combining motor control manipulation and eye-tracking to investigate visuomotor grounding of cognitive processes. Our results indicate that inefficient motor control prompts strategic shifts in eye- movement behavior, with fixations closer to a reference point under moderate motor noise and further away under increased noise. We further find fixational and smooth pursuit eye movements that can be directly mapped to pursued action intentions. These findings shed light on the changes in action selection caused by noise in the motor system and can be used in a next step to investigate moment-to-moment changes in the pursuit of action intentions under inefficient motor control.

The complexity and unpredictability of a situation might contribute to how much an individual feels in control of their actions. Goal-directed behaviour tailored to different situations is enabled through a hierarchy of situated action control combining cognitive and sensorimotor control processes. We use eye-tracking to investigate the grounding of cognitive processes in the sensorimotor system. Our assumption is that different degrees of perceived control trigger cognitive states that are reflected in eye-movement behaviour. Utilizing a dynamic experimental environment, we investigate whether complexity and uncertainty of the situation are top-down processed into fixational eye movements. The distance to a reference point is affected by environmental complexity in all fixations; however environmental uncertainty is only incorporated in fixations that guide motor control. We discuss that these fixations are only executed under high sense of control when there are enough cognitive resources left to top-down process the environmental uncertainty into gaze allocation.