Target Acquisition

Target acquisition is the perceptual-motor process of locating a target and directing an effector, a mouse cursor, a crosshair, or a hand, to it. Fitts (1954) showed that the time required to acquire a target scales predictably with the logarithm of the ratio between movement distance and target width, a relationship now called Fitts's Law: closer, larger targets are acquired faster and more reliably than distant, small ones, holding all else constant.

Reference: Fitts, 1954. The NeuroRank implementation holds the canonical form and scales interference via task-irrelevant stimulus density.

1. A close-range flick shot on a large hitbox is far more forgiving than a long-range shot on a small, distant target, exactly as Fitts's Law predicts.
2. Pre-aiming a common angle effectively shrinks the movement distance to zero, turning target acquisition into pure reaction time.
3. Sensitivity settings trade off movement distance against precision, and Fitts's Law describes exactly why there is no single correct sensitivity for every engagement range.

NeuroRank's Aim module presents targets across varying distances and sizes. Response time together with distFromCenter captures the speed-accuracy tradeoff central to Fitts's Law, and both feed the Aim Precision dimension score.