Hands up: Attentional prioritization of space near the hand

Catherine L. Reed, Jefferson D. Grubb, Cleophus Steele
2006 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance  
This study explored whether hand location affected spatial attention. The authors used a visual covertorienting paradigm to examine whether spatial attention mechanisms-location prioritization and shifting attention-were supported by bimodal, hand-centered representations of space. Placing 1 hand next to a target location, participants detected visual targets following highly predictive visual cues. There was no a priori reason for the hand to influence task performance unless hand presence
more » ... uenced attention. Results showed that target detection near the hand was facilitated relative to detection away from the hand, regardless of cue validity. Similar facilitation was found with only proprioceptive or visual hand location information but not with arbitrary visual anchors or distant targets. Hand presence affected attentional prioritization of space, not the shifting of attention.
doi:10.1037/0096-1523.32.1.166 pmid:16478334 fatcat:a4byu52mvrewdf36z6q3yywaza