title: The distribution of spatial attention changes with task demands during goal-directed reaching.
abstract: Goal-directed movements are commonly used to allow humans to interact with their environment. When making a goal-directed movement in a natural environment, there are many competing stimuli. It is therefore important to understand how making a goal-directed movement could be impacted by the need to divide attention between the movement and competing stimuli. We used a dual-task paradigm to investigate the sharing of attentional resources between a search task in central vision and a peripheral pointing task completed concurrently. Results suggest some degree of shared attentional resources between these two tasks with performance on both central and peripheral tasks degraded under dual-task conditions. Movement latency, but not movement time, was also affected by dual-task conditions. Altogether, the results suggest that there is a cost to reach performance if attention is engaged away from the movement goal. Interestingly, this cost is associated with movement planning rather than execution.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, The University of Adelaide, North Terrace, Adelaide, Australia, heidi.long@adelaide.edu.au.
authors.forename: Heidi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Long
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ma-Wyatt
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D014794:Visual Fields; D055815:Young Adult