Abstract
The present study investigated the automatic influence of perceiving a picture that indicates other’s action on one’s own task performance in terms of spatial compatibility and effector priming. Participants pressed left and right buttons with their left and right hands respectively, depending on the color of a central dot target. Preceding the target, a left or right hand stimulus (pointing either to the left or right with the index or little finger) was presented. In Experiment 1, with brief presentation of the pointing hand, a spatial compatibility effect was observed: responses were faster when the direction of the pointed finger and the response position were spatially congruent than when incongruent. The spatial compatibility effect was larger for the pointing index finger stimulus compared to the pointing little finger stimulus. Experiment 2 employed longer duration of the pointing hand stimuli. In addition to the spatial compatibility effect for the pointing index finger, the effector priming effect was observed: responses were faster when the anatomical left/right identity of the pointing and response hands matched than when the pointing and response hands differed in left/right identity. The results indicate that with sufficient processing time, both spatial/symbolic and anatomical features of a static body part implying another’s action simultaneously influence different aspects of the perceiver’s own action. Hierarchical coding, according to which an anatomical code is used only when a spatial code is unavailable, may not be applicable if stimuli as well as responses contain anatomical features.
Highlights
Other’s actions affect one’s own cognitive processing and task performance
EXPERIMENT 1 In Experiment 1, we examined the automatic influence of briefly presented task-irrelevant hand stimuli depicting leftward or rightward pointing with the little or index finger on a manual horizontal button-pressing task, from the perspective of spatial compatibility between the pointing direction and the location of the response button and effector priming between the pointing hand and the identity of the response hand
Mean RTs for correct responses were submitted to an analysis of variance (ANOVA) with pointing finger of the hand stimulus, spatial compatibility between the left/right pointing direction and the left/right response key position
Summary
Other’s actions affect one’s own cognitive processing and task performance. For example, the perceived direction of another’s eye gaze is widely known to elicit reflexive attentional shifts, even when the gaze direction is non-predictive or counter-predictive (Friesen and Kingstone, 1998; Driver et al, 1999; Ristic and Kingstone, 2005; Galfano et al, 2012). The index finger pointing gesture is used as a social cue to communicate spatial information; the performer’s intent to indicate spatial direction and/or location might be stronger than his or her eye gaze (Burton et al, 2009). The attentional cueing effect was smaller for hand stimuli with the index finger shortened to the length of the little finger, or with the little finger lengthened to the length of the index finger, than for the normal index finger pointing stimuli. These findings suggest that directional body parts affect a viewer’s attention, and that the index finger pointing gesture is selectively strong during this process
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