The area immediately surrounding the hand has been shown to give rise to alterations in visual perception. This area is referred to as peri-hand space. When viewing objects in this area, studies have shown that people are slower to look away from objects and faster to detect new objects compared to objects that are not in peri-hand space. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of sports training on altered visual perception in peri-hand space. Practice with motor skills enables the brain to become more plastic and strengthens the brain areas that are repeatedly used. Thus, we hypothesized that athletes would have greater visual processing alterations (hereafter referred to as peri-hand effects or PHE’s) when viewing objects in peri-hand space compared to non-athletes because athletes spend far greater time training the visual and motor areas of their brains to be able to use their hands in order to achieve an athletic goal. We tested this by having a group of athletes and a group of non-athletes perform a visual search task where they had to identify a target image amongst an array of distractor images while wearing an eye tracker. We did not find any significant peri-hand space effects and thus, also did not find any main effects of athletic experience on our measures of peri-hand space. We did find that participants were faster to find and react to graspable objects compared to ungraspable objects.The results are discussed in relation to the idea that the lack of PHE’s in our results was due to the images in our task being too complex to elicit any PHE’s.
