The attentional repulsion effect and relative size judgments

Perception of the non-dominant hand as larger after non-judgmental focus on its details

We investigated whether brief non-judgmental focus on the details of one's non-dominant hand might lead to changes in perception of its size, and if such a change would be related to central coherence, body dissatisfaction, or how much participants liked their hand. After two pilot experiments (N = 28 and N = 30 respectively: Appendix 1), a within-subject experiment (N = 82) was conducted. Subjects were mainly university students. They were asked to rate the size of their non-dominant hand and how much they liked it, and the size of an external object (a X-box controller) on a visual-analog scale before and after focusing on their details for 5 min, as well as the size of another object (a calculator) before and after a 5 min long distraction task. After completing the tasks, they were asked to respond to a brief questionnaire on body dissatisfaction. A s significant interaction between time and factors (non-dominant hand, X-box controller and calculator) emerged (F(2, 78) = 6.41, p = .003). Participants rated their hand as larger after focusing on its details compared to baseline, and this change was significantly larger than those reported for the X-box controller. No significant change in how they liked their hand was observed, and contrary to the pilot experiments, the perceived change in size of the hand was not related to body dissatisfaction. The significant change in reporting of the size of the hand after focusing on its details seems to be an interesting finding, worth further replications.

Attentional Capture from Looming Alters Perception

Studies suggest looming motion represents a special class of attentional capture stimulus due to behavioral urgency: the need to act upon objects moving toward us in an environment. In particular, one theory suggests that faster reaction times to targets cued by looming relative to receding motion are driven by post-attentional, motor-priming processes beyond the attentional capture effects seen with other stimulus qualities such as color pop-out. The present study tested this theory using a relative size judgment task where targets were pre-cued by looming and receding optic flow fields. Results show systematic increases in the perceived size of targets that were cued by looming flow fields, consistent with previous attentional capture studies using onset cues. These results challenge theories attributing behavioral changes from looming motion to motor-priming alone.