Abstract
We report a series of experiments about a little-studied type of compatibility effect between a stimulus and a response: the priming of manual gestures via sounds associated with these gestures. The goal was to investigate the plasticity of the gesture-sound associations mediating this type of priming. Five experiments used a primed choice-reaction task. Participants were cued by a stimulus to perform response gestures that produced response sounds; those sounds were also used as primes before the response cues. We compared arbitrary associations between gestures and sounds (key lifts and pure tones) created during the experiment (i.e. no pre-existing knowledge) with ecological associations corresponding to the structure of the world (tapping gestures and sounds, scraping gestures and sounds) learned through the entire life of the participant (thus existing prior to the experiment). Two results were found. First, the priming effect exists for ecological as well as arbitrary associations between gestures and sounds. Second, the priming effect is greatly reduced for ecologically existing associations and is eliminated for arbitrary associations when the response gesture stops producing the associated sounds. These results provide evidence that auditory-motor priming is mainly created by rapid learning of the association between sounds and the gestures that produce them. Auditory-motor priming is therefore mediated by short-term associations between gestures and sounds that can be readily reconfigured regardless of prior knowledge.
Highlights
Sounds provide essential feedback for many everyday events: for example, sounds tell listeners that water is boiling in the pot, that a chunk of vegetable is stuck in the blender, or that a bottle is about to overflow
Participants who reached a minimum 85% accuracy across trials were considered in the analyses
Accuracy and relative reaction times were submitted to a three-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the response gesture and the congruency between prime and response sounds as the within-participant factors and the groups as the between-participant factors, similar to the analyses reported by [40]
Summary
Sounds provide essential feedback for many everyday events: for example, sounds tell listeners that water is boiling in the pot, that a chunk of vegetable is stuck in the blender, or that a bottle is about to overflow. Even in the absence of visual input, listeners can identify some properties of the events causing the sounds [1,2,3]. Several of the object properties that are typically thought of as visual, such as an object’s shape, size, and material, can be conveyed through the auditory channel in constrained circumstances [4,5,6,7]. Recent research suggests that the auditory channel is superior at conveying properties of actions. Listeners are better at identifying that a sound event was made by certain actions, such as objects being rolled or scraped, than they are discerning certain properties of the objects.
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