Priming gestures with associated sounds

Abstract

Hommel (1996) established that sounds artificially associated with key presses could prime key presses. The goal of the current study was to explore the nature of the link between auditory perception and manual actions by comparing the priming of manual actions by naturally and artificially associated sounds. We report three experiments. The procedure in each experiment consisted of cueing participants to perform manual gestures. Executing the gestures produced feedback sounds; those sounds were also used as primes before the response cues. Experiment One replicated Hommel’s procedure: participants lifted keys that triggered artificial sounds. Experiment Two used sounds naturally produced by tapping or scraping wooden dowels on a custom interface. Experiment Three replicated Experiment Two with the sounds of the dowels muffled. The priming effect was observed on reaction times in Experiments One and Two but not in Experiment Three. These results show that long-term associations between sounds and gestures created in memory by repeated experience throughout life are not sufficient to prime the gestures. Instead they suggest that auditory-motor priming may be mediated by associations between sounds and gestures that are created on-line by the experiment via associative learning, and which are short-lived and can be readily reconfigured.