A bias to detail: how hand position modulates visual learning and visual memory

Abstract

In this report, we examine whether and how altered aspects of perception and attention near the hands affect one's learning of to-be-remembered visual material. We employed the contextual cuing paradigm of visual learning in two experiments. Participants searched for a target embedded within images of fractals and other complex geometrical patterns while either holding their hands near to or far from the stimuli. When visual features and structural patterns remained constant across to-be-learned images (Exp. 1), no difference emerged between hand postures in the observed rates of learning. However, when to-be-learned scenes maintained structural pattern information but changed in color (Exp. 2), participants exhibited substantially slower rates of learning when holding their hands near the material. This finding shows that learning near the hands is impaired in situations in which common information must be abstracted from visually unique images, suggesting a bias toward detail-oriented processing near the hands.

From body shadows to bodily attention: Automatic orienting of tactile attention driven by cast shadows

“…Similarly, detection of contralesional visual stimuli can improve in a patient with a lesion of the visual cortex, when these stimuli are placed within hand reach (Schendel & Robertson, 2004). This finding has now been extended to healthy humans, with advantages in visual processing documented in a range of perceptual (Abrams, Davoli, Du, Knapp, & Paull, 2008;Cosman & Vecera, 2010;Reed, Grubb, & Steele, 2006;Tseng & Bridgeman, 2011) and learning tasks (Davoli, Brockmole, & Goujon, 2012). Furthermore, it has been revealed even when the proximity between the hands and the visual stimuli is only an imagined posture (Davoli & Abrams, 2009).…”

How visual and semantic information influence learning in familiar contexts.

“…To account for the differences in baseline search rates across groups in our analyses of learning, we focused on a proportional measure of performance (a cuing effect) where the difference in search time between the unrepeated and repeated trials was divided by the search performance observed for unrepeated trials (see Brockmole et al, 2008;Davoli, Brockmole, & Goujon, 2012). Using this procedure, for example, a cuing effect of .33 would indicate that search performance for repeated trials was one third faster than unrepeated trials.…”

Investigating implicit statistical learning mechanisms through contextual cueing

“…As a result, the exposure duration to the displays (usually longer in fMRI studies), the size of the display, the distance to the monitor, the visual angle, and the color of the items are all characteristics that can influence the width of the spatial window of attention, and consequentially whether the context will be encoded at a local or global level. For example, it has been shown that CC within visually-complex images was affected by the proximity with which the hands were held to the stimuli, suggesting a bias toward detail-oriented processing near the hands [85].…”