Abstract
Recent literature has suggested that near-hand effects, the altered visual processing of stimuli that appear near the hands, are not as robust as previously thought. Difficulty in replicating some of the visual processing changes, such as attentional biases and visual pathway manipulations, that were thought to occur when stimuli were viewed in perihand space has led to several researchers questioning the reliability of these effects (e.g., Dosso & Kingstone, 2018; Sahar & Makovski, 2019). To investigate discrepancies between studies, we ran two pre-registered experiments. Study 1 was an attempted replication of Abrams and Weidler (2014) who found that when stimuli appeared near the hands of the participants, processing via the magnocellular visual pathway was facilitated for low-spatial frequency stimuli and processing via the parvocellular pathway was impaired for high-spatial frequency stimuli. However, our study failed to replicate this finding. Our participants were significantly faster with their hands far from the stimuli compared to near the stimuli. As suggested by previous work (Taylor et al., 2015), this result could be a facilitation for processing all stimuli through the parvocellular pathway regardless of spatial frequency, or it could be due to responding with a different finger when their hands were up versus down. To investigate this effect further, and potentially drive the key interaction, our second study replicated the first, with two changes: we controlled response finger and the target was presented for a longer duration. The longer duration was expected to facilitate processing in the parvocellular pathway (Edwards et al., 2021). However, there were no significant effects of hand placement. Taken together, the results of these two studies add to the growing evidence that near-hand effects and altered visual processing are unstable in replications. Further investigations are needed to identify the features that are driving these differences between studies.