Abstract
Five experiments assessed whether priming a hand shape facilitated judgments about the sensibility of actions performed with objects. Primes specified the hand shape's size (full hand or part) and whether operative fingers were flexed or extended. These dimensions define four prototypical shapes: pinch (part, flexed), poke (part, extended), clench (full, flexed), and palm (full, extended). Primes were verbal in Experiments 1–3 and “iconic” in Experiments 4–5. In Experiments 1–4, subjects were initially trained to enact the shape, given a prime. They then judged the sensibility of verbal action/object pairs, such as “eat a carrot,” which were preceded by a neutral or informative prime. Response times were consistently reduced, relative to the neutral condition, when both dimensions of the hand shape were primed. In Experiment 5, subjects were trained to vocalize a hand-shape label, given a prime, and no priming effect subsequently occurred. These results suggest a cognitive/motoric representation of the hand with which actions on objects can be modeled, and the results can be interrogated.
Published Version
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