Goodhew, Stephanie CatherineClarke, Ruby2016-01-051069-9384http://hdl.handle.net/1885/95280Visual perception is altered near the hands, and several mechanisms have been proposed to account for this, including differences in attention and a bias toward magnocellular-preferential processing. Here we directly pitted these theories against one another in a visual search task consisting of either magnocellular- or parvocellular-preferred stimuli. Surprisingly, we found that when a large number of items are in the display, there is a parvocellular processing bias in near-hand space. Considered in the context of existing results, this indicates that hand proximity does not entail an inflexible bias toward magnocellular processing, but instead that the attentional demands of the task can dynamically alter the balance between magnocellular and parvocellular processing that accompanies hand proximity.This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (No. DE140101734) awarded to S.C.G© 2015 Psychonomic Society, Inc.attentionmagnocellularnear-hand spaceparvocellularperihand spacevisual search2015-11-3010.3758/s13423-015-0844-12016-02-24