Abstract
Research has shown that hand proximity affects visual experience in various ways, such as prolonging visual search, delaying switches between global and local elements, and biasing attention to stimuli presented near the hand. The present study investigated how hand proximity affects motion-induced blindness (MIB), a visual illusion wherein salient objects fluctuate into and out of conscious awareness when superimposed on a global moving pattern. On each trial, participants (N = 30, right-handed) viewed a display containing a central fixation, a static target, and a grid of blue crosses rotating clockwise. The target was a yellow ring positioned in the upper left or right quadrant of the display. Participants maintained gaze on the fixation while paying covert attention to the target. They pressed and held the space bar when the target disappeared from awareness, and released it when the target reappeared. The time between the space bar press and release was measured as the MIB duration. Participants were also instructed to respond with their left or right hand while keeping the non-responding hand in the lap (i.e., hand-far) or on the same side of the screen (i.e., hand-near). The experiment was a 2 (responding hand: left, right) × 2 (non-responding hand position: lap, screen) × 2 (target location: left, right) factorial design with one block for each condition. The results showed a significant main effect of target location (p = .043), indicating that participants experienced longer MIB episodes when the target was presented in the upper left compared to the upper right quadrant. This is consistent with previous research showing that MIB is not uniformly distributed across space. Importantly, the results also showed that non-responding hand position had no effect on MIB duration, suggesting that the visual processing involved in MIB is less sensitive to hand proximity.