Magnifying the view of the hand to induce a lateral bias in visuospatial attention

Details

Supervisors

Edwards, Martin

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques

Abstract

Embodied cognition has recently garnered widespread interest in the cognitive neuroscience research community. Links between body representation and space perception have already been demonstrated. Notably, visual magnification of a body part has shown encouraging results in the tactile (Kennett, Taylor-Clarke, & Haggard, 2001) and pain (Moseley, Parsons, & Spence, 2008) perception domains, as well as in motor performance (Marino, Stucchi, Nava, Haggard, & Maravita, 2010). Ambron et al. (2018) provided evidence that visual magnification of the hand induces changes in its cortical representation and in motor cortex excitability. However, its effects on visuospatial attention have not yet been studied. The present study aimed at better comprehending the dynamics of visuospatial perception and attention in healthy individuals. For this purpose, we investigated if visual magnification of the hand induced a lateral bias in visuospatial attention. Visuospatial attention was tested using a target detection task, before and after a manipulation phase. In the manipulation phase, the participants were asked to perform a grasping task with one hand while wearing magnifying glasses. The participants were assigned into one of two groups: either they had their right hand or their left hand visually magnified. We hypothesised that the participants would find targets faster on the side of their magnified hand after the manipulation, because magnification of the hand would have caused an ipsilateral bias in attention. The results do not allow validation of this hypothesis. However, they may suggest a non-lateralised enhancement of visual attention, which is encouraging but needs further testing. Also, the results support theories of pseudoneglect and reading direction habits. In the future, a longer manipulation phase, in the same subspace as the attentional task, with an additional normal and/or minified vision condition will likely lead to more promising results.