Effects of hand proximity and movement direction in spatial and temporal gap discrimination

• Main Authors: Michael Wiemers, Martin H Fischer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2016-12-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: Attention; Visual Perception; movement preparation; perception and action; two visual system
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01930/full

Previous research on the interplay between static manual postures and visual attention revealed enhanced visual selection near the hands (near-hand effect). During active movements there is also superior visual performance when moving towards compared to away from the stimulus (direction effect). The modulated visual pathways hypothesis argues that differential involvement of magno- and parvocellular visual processing streams causes the near-hand effect. The key finding supporting this hypothesis is an increase in temporal and a reduction in spatial processing in near-hand space (Gozli, West, & Pratt, 2012). Since this hypothesis has, so far, only been tested with static hand postures, we provide a conceptual replication of Gozli et al.’s result with moving hands, thus also probing the generality of the direction effect. Participants performed temporal or spatial gap discriminations while their right hand was moving below the display. In contrast to Gozli et al. (2012), temporal gap discrimination was superior at intermediate and not near hand proximity. In spatial gap discrimination, a direction effect without hand proximity effect suggests that pragmatic attentional maps overshadowed temporal/spatial processing biases for far/near-hand space.