Peri-hand space is described as the area immediately surrounding a person’s hands. This area has been shown to lead to enhanced visual processing, demonstrated in studies involving a visual search task. The functions of peri-hand space and its neurological development suggest that it evolved to facilitate fine hand movements - this pilot study set out to investigate this. To date, no research using a visual search task has had participants define peri-hand space and act on target objects with the same hand; we hypothesized that this methodology would show greater peri-hand space effects than when defining peri hand space with one hand and acting on the object with another hand. Our results showed that: 1) participants accurately identified significantly more target objects with their non-dominant hand compared to their dominant hand, 2) participants found the target objects significantly faster when the object was graspable compared to ungraspable, 3) when participant’s hands were near the screen they had a significantly longer total fixation duration than when their hand was away from the screen, 4) Participant’s target fixation duration was significantly shorter when using their dominant hand to act on the object compared to their non-dominant hand, and 5) participants fixated on the target for a significantly shorter amount of time when the object was graspable compared to nongraspable. These results partially support our hypothesis. This pilot study pioneered a novel way to study peri-hand space and its effects. In the future, we will collect more participants (n=30) as well as add extra conditions to minimize handedness effects.
