Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 6, 2025
07:30
Efficiently Recording the Eye-Hand Coordination to Incoordination Spectrum
Published on: March 21, 2019
8.0K
Eye and hand movements disrupt attentional control
Nina Maria Hanning1,2, Luca Wollenberg1,3, Donatas Jonikaitis4
1Department Psychologie, Allgemeine und Experimentelle Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany.
Plos One
|January 19, 2022
Summary
Voluntary attentional control weakens when planning movements, showing action planning dominates visual focus. The brain can track multiple locations simultaneously, but voluntary attention is fragile.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Visual Attention
Background:
- Voluntary attentional control enables selective focus amidst distractions, crucial for goal-driven behavior.
- Attention shifts are often driven by impending eye and hand movements in daily life.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the robustness of voluntary attentional control when concurrent with action planning.
- To determine if action-driven attention shifts interfere with or complement voluntary attention.
Main Methods:
- A multi-tasking paradigm where participants maintained voluntary attention at one location while planning eye or hand movements to another.
- Task difficulty and memory load were manipulated to assess their impact on attentional control.
Main Results:
- Voluntary attentional control was impaired by simultaneous action planning, even under reduced task difficulty.
- Performance costs were specific to voluntary attention; simultaneous attention benefits were observed at movement targets.
- The visual system demonstrated the capacity for concurrent representation of multiple attentional foci.
Conclusions:
- Voluntary attentional control is fragile and significantly impacted by premotor attention shifts.
- Action-driven selection plays a primary role in visual selection, often overriding voluntary control.
