Visual attention around a hand location localized by proprioceptive information.

Facilitation of visual processing has been reported in the space near the hand. To understand the underlying mechanism of hand proximity attention, we conducted experiments that isolated hand-related effects from top-down attention, proprioceptive information from visual information, the position effect from the influence of action, and the distance effect from the peripersonal effect. The flash-lag effect was used as an index of attentional modulation. Because the results showed that the flash-lag effect was smaller at locations near the hand, we concluded that there was a facilitation effect of the visual stimuli around the hand location identified through proprioceptive information. This was confirmed by conventional reaction time measures. We also measured steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) in order to investigate the spatial properties of hand proximity attention and top-down attention. The results showed that SSVEP reflects the effect of top-down attention but not that of hand proximity attention. This suggests that the site of hand proximity attention is at a later stage of visual processing, assuming that SSVEP responds to neural activities at the early stages. The results of left-handers differed from those of right-handers, and this is discussed in relation to handedness variation.