Abstract
The present study focused on priming effects on pointing with everyday objects. In a set of four experiments, a visuomotor priming paradigm was used to investigate the nature of visuomotor processing (automatic versus task relevant). By manipulating congruency of orientation and location we found that location congruency facilitates the initiation time of pointing whereas orientation congruency does not. We provide evidence to show that motor planning is influenced by the goal of the action, and that how visual information is processed and held in memory depends on the task relevance. These data are consistent with the proposed interaction between visuomotor and higher processes during the planning and execution of actions such as pointing.
Highlights
Every day we see different objects in our environment, and often we interact with them
The no-prime condition was the only condition where there was a difference between the object as prime (OP) and bar as prime (BP), with longer initiation time (IT) in the OP block
We found the same effect in our previous study, which focused on priming of grasping [3]. To account for this result we proposed that seeing an object can activate its representation based on allocentric information and its functional identity, whereas seeing a bar does not activate precise representation [17], and that this representation is important for priming target grasping
Summary
Every day we see different objects in our environment, and often we interact with them. We investigated what kind of information is momentarily memorized and potentially facilitates planning of pointing Is it only information relevant for a specific motor task (here pointing) or is it more general information about an action associated with an object? For example, involve a conscious intention to initiate the action, with the selection of both the appropriate target and action [4]. Some authors suggested that a specific action involves specific visual processing, because how information is processed depends on the intentions and plans of the actor [7]. The first saccade tended to go to distractors having the same orientation as the target only when a grasping response was required This suggests that object orientation is more pertinent for the selection process when a grasp response, rather than a point response, is required. Some authors [8] found that a grasping response, but not a pointing one, was influenced by a change in the object’s orientation
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