Hand proximity--not arm posture--alters vision near the hands

Recent research has revealed remarkable changes in vision and cognition when participants place their hands near the stimuli that they are evaluating. In this paradigm, participants perform a task both with their hands on the sides of the monitor (near) and with their hands on their laps (far). However, that experimental setup has typically confounded hand position with body posture: When participants had their hands near the stimuli, they also always had their hands up around shoulder height. Thus, it is possible that the reported changes "near the hands" are instead artifacts of this posture. In the present study, participants performed a visual search task with their hands near and far from the stimuli. However, in the hands-near condition, participants rested their hands on a table, and in the hands-far condition, they had their arms raised. After eliminating the postural confound, we still found evidence for slower search rates near the hands--replicating earlier results and indicating that the hands' proximity to the stimuli is truly what affects vision.