Functional role of jittering movements for visual acuity

Determine whether the agents’ observed high-frequency left–right jittering movements during foraging improve visual acuity, or whether these movements are merely compensatory behaviors to avoid missing targets; rigorously assess their impact on perceptual resolution.

Background

The authors observed that trained agents often did not move directly toward food but instead exhibited high-frequency lateral jitters along their trajectory. While this could be a compensatory strategy to avoid missing targets, the literature suggests that retinal jitter can enhance visual acuity in biological systems.

They explicitly state uncertainty about the cause and role of the jitters and propose to investigate whether such movement patterns also improve the agents’ visual acuity, paralleling known benefits of fixational eye movements.