Object-Guided Spatial Selection in Touch Without Concurrent Changes in the Perceived Location of the Hands

Abstract

In an endogenous cueing paradigm with central visual cues, observers made speeded responses to tactile targets at the hands, which were either close together or far apart, and holding either two separate objects or one common object between them. When the hands were far apart, the response time costs associated with attending to the wrong hand were reduced when attention had to be shifted along one object jointly held by both hands compared to when it was shifted over the same distance but across separate objects. Similar reductions in attentional costs were observed when the hands were placed closer together, suggesting that processing at one hand is less prioritised over that at another when the hands can be 'grouped' by virtue of arising from the same spatial location or from the same object.Probes of perceived hand locations throughout the task showed that holding a common object decreased attentional separability without decreasing the perceived separation between the hands. Our findings suggest that tactile events at the hands may be represented in a spatial framework that flexibly adapts to (object-guided) attentional demands, while their relative coordinates are simultaneously preserved.

The role of connectedness in haptic object perception

“…Moreover, there is evidence for object-guided attention in touch. It has recently been demonstrated that attentional selection can be object driven, as its time course was shown to be modulated depending on whether the two hands were holding the same object or not 26 27 . This suggests that processing times will be reduced when information is contained within the same perceptual group, or object.…”

The somatosensory system: Exploration of digit-area somatotopy and feature-based attention

“…Non-spatial attributes of attention have only very rarely been explored for the tactile domain. Recent ERP studies (Gillmeister et al, 2009(Gillmeister et al, , 2013 found evidence for object-based attention in touch. Selective attention to certain stimulus dimensions like orientation or frequency was also explored in several studies , which revealed decreased reaction times for valid compared to neutral cueing of the target's stimulus dimension , but did not find any cortical effects of attention .…”