There is something on the hand!

You don’t want to grasp a cup of hot tea without keeping an eye on what you’re doing; you’re all too familiar with that burning sensation. Interacting with nearby visuotactile stimuli and maintaining body integrity are both functions that encompass peripersonal space and are suggested to be dependent upon the predictive (negative or positive) value of the stimuli. By manipulating both spatial attention and distance between the location of the hand and visual distractor stimuli in a visual search task (Exp 1) we showed that target search times were slowed down by a distractor stimulus (distractor effect), and that this effect varied according to the relative proximity of the visual distractor stimulus to the hand (on the back of the hand or far from the hand). The effect got relatively bigger when the distractor was displayed on the back of the hand, but only for targets that were presented in proximity to the fingers. When the distractor was further from the hand the effect generally decreased. A burning pain sensation in the hand (Exp 2) not only facilitated target search in general, it caused the distractor effect to diminish and particularly so for distractors on the hand. Interestingly, this effect was predominantly seen in participants that scored high on Trait anxiety. Possibly, attention was no longer captured by the distractor because of a narrower attentional window, which previous studies showed to be related to negative emotion.