Psychology Commons^™

Bimanual Reaching Across The Hemispace: Which Hand Is Yoked To Which?, Gavin Buckingham, Gordon Binsted, David Carey

Gavin Buckingham

When both hands perform concurrent goal-directed reaches, they become yoked to one another. To investigate the direction of this coupling (i.e., which hand is yoked to which), the temporal dynamics of bimanual reaches were compared with equivalent-amplitude unimanual reaches. These reaches were to target pairs located on either the left or right sides of space; meaning that in the bimanual condition, one hand's contralateral (more difficult) reach accompanied by the other hand's ipsilateral (easier) reach. By comparing which hand's difficult reach was improved more by the presence of the other hand's easier ipsilateral reach, we were able to demonstrate asymmetries …

Rightward Biases During Bimanual Reaching, Gavin Buckingham, David Carey

Gavin Buckingham

Two experiments were carried out to investigate whether attention is biased toward the right hand of right handers during bimanual coordination (Peters 1981). A novel discontinuous double-step reaching task was developed, where right-handed participants executed a bimanual reach followed by a left or right hand unimanual reach. Asymmetries in the downtime between the bimanual and unimanual reach portions (the refractory period) were used to infer the direction of attention. A shorter right hand refractory period was found in the first experiment, indicating a rightward bias in attention. In a second experiment, shifting the focus of attention during the bimanual portion …

Asymmetries In Attention Toward The Dominant Hand: Input Or Output?, Gavin Buckingham, Julie Main, David Carey

Gavin Buckingham

Peters (1981) suggested that an asymmetrical bias in attention (toward the right hand of right handers) could account for many manual asymmetries in bimanual task performance. Support for this notion comes from Honda (1982), who demonstrated preferential monitoring of the dominant hand during a bimanual reaching task, while Buckingham and Carey (2007) observed shorter refractory periods (dwell time in a bimanual discontinuous double-step reaching task) for the right hand.

Recent evidence may indicate an intentional (i.e. selection related behaviour – motor attention) bias toward the dominant hand (Bestelmeyer & Carey, 2004). The current study tests the hypothesis that the right …