Different Mechanisms for Visual Attention at the Hand-movement Goal and Endogenous Visual Attention

Visual perception is closely related to body movements and action, and it is known that processing visual stimuli is facilitated at the hand or at the hand-movement goal. Such facilitation suggests that there may be an attentional process associated with the hands or hand movements. To investigate the underlying mechanisms of visual attention at a hand-movement goal, we conducted two experiments to examine whether attention at the hand-movement goal is a process independent from endogenous attention. Endogenous attention is attention that is intentionally focused on a location, feature, or object. We controlled the hand-movement goal and endogenous attention separately to investigate the spatial profiles of the two types of attention. A visual target was presented either at the goal of hand movement (same condition) or at its opposite side (opposite condition) while steady-state visual-evoked potential (SSVEP) was used to estimate the spatial distributions of the facilitation effect from the 2 types of attention around the hand-movement goal and around the visual target through EEG. We estimated the spatial profile of attentional modulation for the hand-movement goal by taking the difference in SSVEP amplitude between conditions with and without hand movement, thereby obtaining the effect of visual endogenous attention alone. The results showed a peak at the hand-movement goal, independent of the location of the visual target where participants intentionally focused their attention (endogenous attention). We also found differences in the spatial extent of attentional modulation. Spatial tuning was narrow around the hand-movement goal (i.e., attentional facilitation only at the goal location) but was broadly tuned around the focus of endogenous attention (i.e., attentional facilitation spreading over adjacent stimulus locations), which was obtained from the condition without hand movement. These results suggest the existence of two separate mechanisms, one underlying the attention at the hand-movement goal and another underlying endogenous attention.