Grab it! Biased attention in functional hand and tool space

Abstract

This study explored whether functional properties of the hand and tools influence the allocation of spatial attention. In four experiments that used a visual-orienting paradigm with predictable lateral cues, hands or tools were placed near potential target locations. Results showed that targets appearing in the hand's grasping space (i.e., near the palm) and the rake's raking space (i.e., near the prongs) produced faster responses than did targets appearing to the back of the hand, to the back of the rake, or near the forearm. Validity effects were found regardless of condition in all experiments, but they did not interact with the target-in-grasping/raking-space bias. Thus, the topology of the facilitated space around the hand is, in part, defined by the hand's grasping function and can be flexibly extended by functional experience using a tool. These findings are consistent with the operation of bimodal neurons, and this embodied component is incorporated into a neurally based model of spatial attention.

Continuous hand movement induces a far-hand bias in attentional priority

“…This observation is consistent with the idea that attention is shifted ahead to a discrete action-relevant location. The finding replicates earlier studies showing that covert attention is allocated during hand movement planning (e.g., Baldauf et al, 2006;Fischer, 1997; for a review, see also Baldauf & Deubel, 2010) and with recent work exploring the effect of hand position on covert attention (Reed et al, 2010;Reed et al, 2006). Specifically, our findings show that attentional allocation is driven not only by hand placement in a resting state (i.e., holding the hand still in a certain location within the display), but also in continuous manual motion when this motion is visually concealed.…”

“…Our main finding is a strong modulation of the previously established near-hand effect by the direction of hand movement. While previous work has either used static hands (e.g., Reed et al, 2010;Reed et al, 2006) or averaged across movement directions (Adam et al, 2012a), we showed an effect of hand movement direction when the hand was far from the probe location-namely, at the opposite side of the screen. In this condition, probe discrimination performance increased substantially when the hand moved toward the probe, as compared with when the hand moved away from the probe.…”

“…Effects of action on visual perception, in turn, are more subtle and have only recently been studied (e.g., Bekkering & Neggers, 2002;Fagioli, Hommel, & Schubotz, 2007;Vishton et al, 2007;Wohlschläger, 2000). Emerging from this research is growing evidence that visual attentional mechanisms are affected by concurrent action planning (Baldauf & Deubel, 2008;Baldauf, Wolf, & Deubel, 2006;Fischer & Hoellen, 2004) and the position of our hands (Abrams, Davoli, Du, Knapp, & Paull, 2008;Reed, Betz, Garza, & Roberts, 2010;Reed, Grubb, & Steele, 2006; see also Adam et al, 2008). We briefly review the most relevant findings.…”

Movement paths in operating hand-held tools: tests of distal-shift hypotheses

“…For example, Collins, Schicke, and Röder (2008) found increased attention on the effective part of the tool as well as on hand positions, with attention being generally higher at the tip of the tool. Reed et al (2010) showed that increased attention to the effective part of the tool after training with the same tool only occurs if the effective part of the tool is functionally relevant for the executed action. Whether or not attention is directed to the effective part of the tool or to the hand should be under strategic control.…”

Substituting objects from consciousness: A review of object substitution masking

“…One way to do this is to place visual stimuli in near-hand space. It was initially proposed that near-hand space incurs enhanced attentional processing (Reed, Betz, Garza, & Roberts, 2010;Reed, Grubb, & Steele, 2006) or reduced attentional disengagement (Abrams, Davoli, Du, Knapp, & Paull, 2008). More recently, however, there has been evidence to suggest that it is the purview of upregulated contribution of the magnocellular channel, which has greater temporal resolution but poorer spatial encoding, relative to its parvocellular counterpart (Gozli, West, & Pratt, 2012).…”