Fitts Law Tasks

Fitts Law

Fitts’ Law is a way of measuring motor throughput in point-to-point movements. The framework has been extended to evaluating human-computer interactions, but may need refinement depending on the nature of the task and what type of information we care about specifically.

Fitts Law Tasks

Recently, there has been a fair amount of hype about the throughput achieved by the first publicly visible participant in the Neuralink BCI trials. After going to their website and playing the task variant they’re using to quantify information throughput, my immediate reaction was that this is not a throughput task that derives the metric for information transfer from Fitts’ Law. Based on the size of the grid, distance traveled, and the total time it took me to click through (you get to play for 60 seconds total, as many correct clicks as you can), there’s no way based on how high my score was that this is how they’re doing it.

So, I decided to take a stab at making some web-based clicking games to measure motor information throughput. My idea was to make some tweaks and adjustments to our existing Fitts’ Law variants to see if we could make them “fuzzy” and allow participants to score even when they are having a very hard time clicking the target correctly at all. I did the same thing for my best-guess as to how the Neuralink task works, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!