688Psychologists have long recognized that people have finite capacities to attend to different sources of information (Broadbent, 1958;Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963;James, 1948). Because we live in a dynamic environment and cannot fully attend to all information at once, we must flexibly deploy our limited attentional resources in different degrees to various information streams (Kahneman, 1973). Although researchers have identified a number of factors that influence the deployment of attention, until recently the influence of trunk orientation has been largely ignored or taken for granted.To the extent that the configuration of our body parts constrain, our actions at any moment, they influence where we direct spatial attention. Our perceptual systems serve to plan adaptive actions (Previc, 1998;Prinz, 1997), and attention is the process by which we filter and select the most task-relevant perceptual information (Kahneman & Treisman, 1984). Consequently, attention should be deployed to those regions of space most relevant for performing the action.In particular, trunk orientation should be an important anchor for spatial attention (Jeannerod & Biguer, 1987;Karnath, Schenkel, & Fischer, 1991;Ventre, Flandrin, & Jeannerod, 1984). When using sensory information to guide actions, we must determine the relative configuration of the sensory and effector organs. For example, a visually detected object's retinotopic position indicates its location relative to the eye, but we need to know the object's position relative to the hand in order to plan an appropriate reach. This sensorimotor transformation requires that we account for the orientation of each connected structure between the eye and hand-orientation of the eye relative to the head, orientation of the lower arm relative to the upper arm, and so on (Biguer, Jeannerod, & Prablanc, 1985;Karnath, 1997). Structurally, the trunk is the hub to which our head, arms, and legs are flexibly attached. As a result, trunk orientation influences sensorimotor planning for many typical actions and should therefore affect the distribution of spatial attention.The trunk is often aligned with behaviorally important regions of space. First, although we may turn our head and eyes to look in other directions, we usually move in the direction in which the trunk points. The direction of attention toward the path of motion helps us to avoid collisions when locomoting through the environment. A trunk orientation bias for attention would literally help
University of Denver, Denver, ColoradoOur trunks influence where we perform actions in space. Thus, trunk direction may define a region of space that is accorded special treatment by the attention system. We investigated conditions under which a trunk orientation bias for attention might be relevant for healthy adults. Three experiments compared visual detection performance for participants standing and walking on a treadmill. Together, the experiments disambiguate the relative contributions of motor activity, motor load, and cognitive load on ...