Visual context influences how humans walk on winding paths

During walking, proactive balance control mechanisms enable individuals to anticipate and respond to changes in their environment, such as terrain layout or obstacles. These mechanisms rely on sensory inputs, particularly vision, to adjust gait patterns in advance. Visuomotor coupling integrates information from central and peripheral vision to guide locomotion. Central vision provides detailed information about the walking path, including surface characteristics and layout. Peripheral vision processes environmental landmarks to support spatial orientation, depth perception, and self-motion. Together, these inputs allow the nervous system to plan and execute gait adjustments. Disruptions to visual information, whether due to reduced visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, or environmental conditions, can significantly alter walking behavior and challenge proactive balance control. The study associated with these data was designed to investigate how changes in the availability of central and peripheral visual information affect walking behavior when the fundamental walking task remains the same. It also investigated whether these effects vary with path complexity. For the study, 28 young healthy human adult participants (16F/12M; Age 26.2±4.2yrs) walked on both straight and winding virtual paths, while visual information from the walking path and surrounding environment was systematically reduced. This dataset includes their head, pelvis, and feet kinematics as they performed each of these tasks. Additional files provide participant characteristics, such as demographics, anthropometrics, and assessment scores, as well as a marker-set definition key. The study was designed to grow our understanding of visual perception-driven gait adaptations during different goal-directed walking tasks. These data offer a resource to investigate visual and mechanical factors that affect dynamic balance control during walking.

Methods
This experiment included data from 28 healthy human adult participants (16F/12M; Age 26.2±4.2yrs).  Data regarding their baseline demographics and relevant assessment scores are provided (*.xlsx file). 

Participants walked on a motorized treadmill in a Motek M-Gait virtual reality system (https://www.motekmedical.com/). They walked on 4 distinct walking paths, varying by 2 shapes (straight and winding) and 2 color contrasts (high and low). Each path was presented within two distinct virtual environments. Detailed descriptions of the walking paths and environments are provided in the associated README file. Each participant performed two experimental trials (3 min long each) for all 8 walking conditions.

For each trial performed by each participant, motion capture data were recorded with a 10-camera Vicon system (https://www.vicon.com/).  These data were cleaned using Vicon Nexus software, and further processed in Matlab (https://www.mathworks.com/). All marker trajectories and path data (treadmill distance) are provided in this data set.