The allocation of attention on a perpendicular visual display during reaching movements in depth

We investigated how visual attentional resources are allocated during reaching movements. Particularly, this study examined whether or not the direction of the reaching movement affected visual attention resource allocation. Participants held a stylus pen to reach their hand toward a target stimulus on a graphics tablet as quickly and accurately as possible. The direction of the hand movement was either from near to far space or the reverse. They observed visual stimuli and a cursor, which represented the hand position, on a perpendicularly positioned display, instead of directly seeing their hand movements. Regardless of the movement direction, the participants tended with quickly responding to the target stimuli located far from the start position as compared with those located near to the start position. These results led us to conclude that attentional resources were preferentially allocated in the areas far from the start position of reaching movements. These findings may provide important information for basic research on attention, but also contribute to a decrease of human errors in manipulation tasks performed with visual feedback on visual display terminals.