Motor Priming Effects Research Articles

Task-dependent motor representations evoked by spatial words: Implications for embodied accounts of word meaning

Abstract Embodied accounts contend that word meaning is grounded in sensorimotor representation. In support of this view, research has found rapid motor priming effects on vertical movements for words like eagle or shoe, which differ as to whether they are typically associated with an up or down spatial direction. These priming effects are held to be the result of motor representations evoked as an obligatory part of understanding the meaning of a word. In a series of experiments, we show that prime words associated with up or down spatial locations produce vertical perturbations in the horizontal movements of a computer mouse, but that these effects are contingent either on directing conscious attention to the spatial meaning of the word, or on the inclusion of the primed spatial direction in the response set, and that this is true even for strongly spatial words such as up and down. These results show that the motor representations associated with such words are not automatically evoked during reading. We discuss implications for claims that spatial representations reflect our embodied perception of the world.

Visual and motor priming effects on prediction of observed action in the first and third person perspectives

Visual and motor priming effects on prediction of observed action in the first and third person perspectives

Specifying social cognitive processes with a social dual-task paradigm

Automatic imitation tasks measuring motor priming effects showed that we directly map observed actions of other agents onto our own motor repertoire (direct matching). A recent joint action study using a social dual-task paradigm provided evidence for task monitoring. In the present study, we aimed to test (a) if automatic imitation is disturbed during joint action and (b) if task monitoring is content or time dependent. We used a social dual-task that was made of an automatic imitation task (Person 1: Task 1) and a two-choice number task (Person 2: Task 2). Each participant performed one of the two tasks, which were given with a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), in an individual and a joint condition. We found a regular motor priming effect in individual and joint conditions. Under joint conditions, we replicated the previous finding of an increase of reaction times for Person 2 with decreasing SOA. The latter effect was not related to the specific responses performed by both persons. Further, we did not find evidence for a representation of the other's specific S-R mappings. Our findings suggest that (a) automatic imitation is not disturbed during joint action and (b) task monitoring is time dependent.

The face inhibition effect: Social contrast or motor competition?

Merely viewing the faces of famous athletes affects the observers' motor system, suggesting that action-based information is a core feature of person representations, even when no specific action is visible (Bach & Tipper, 2006). Unexpectedly, these person-based motor priming effects were inhibitory. Foot responses were slower when identifying footballers, and hand responses for tennis players. Here, we demonstrate that these inhibitory effects are only evoked when action is implicitly associated with the athletes; when the athletes are seen performing their skilled actions the effect reverses towards facilitation. The contrast between inhibition evoked by implicit action priming and facilitation evoked by the explicit presentation of an action supports the notion of inhibitory control in the motor system. We hypothesise that when no specific action is perceived, a range of actions are activated triggering lateral inhibition, whereas when a specific action is viewed, there is no competition and excitation facilitates similar responses.

When do we simulate non-human agents? Dissociating communicative and non-communicative actions

There is strong evidence that we automatically simulate observed behavior in our motor system. Previous research suggests that this simulation process depends on whether we observe a human or a non-human agent. Measuring a motor priming effect, this study investigated the question of whether agent-sensitivity of motor simulation depends on the specific action observed. Participants saw pictures depicting end positions of different actions on a screen. All postures featured either a human or non-human agent. Participants had to produce the matching action with their left or right hand depending on the hand presented on the screen. Three different actions were displayed: a communicative action (emblem), a transitive (goal-directed) action and an intransitive action. We found motor priming effects of similar size for human and non-human agents for transitive and intransitive actions. However, the motor priming effect for communicative actions was present for the human agent, but absent for the non-human agent. These findings suggest that biological tuning of motor simulation is highly action-selective and depends on whether the observed behavior appears to be driven by a reasonable goal.

Automatic Imitation of Physically Impossible Movements

Motor priming refers to the direct matching of an observed action onto the observer's motor repertoire (lacoboni et al., 1999) leading to a tendency to automatically reproduce the action. Recent research has shown diminished automatic imitation when observing nonbiological agents, biomechanically impossible actions, and non-intentionally produced actions. However, the question of whether automatic imitation also occurs for physically impossible actions remains open We found motor priming effects of the same size for both physically possible and impossible movements in a choice-reaction task paradigm (Experiment 1). Both physically possible and impossible movements also elicited identical motor priming effects when attention was drawn to the difference between possible and impossible movements (Experiment 2). While previous research clearly showed a sensitivity of the automatic imitation system to biological plausibility and attributed intentionality, the present findings show its insensitivity to physical plausibility, a finding that remains unaffected by top-down influences.

Incidental learning of S-R contingencies in the masked prime task.

Subliminal motor priming effects in the masked prime paradigm can only be obtained when primes are part of the task set. In 2 experiments, the authors investigated whether the relevant task set feature needs to be explicitly instructed or could be extracted automatically in an incidental learning paradigm. Primes and targets were symmetrical arrows, with target color, not shape, the response-relevant feature. Shape and color covaried for targets (e.g., <> always blue, >< always green), whereas primes were always black. Over time, a negative compatibility effect (NCE; response benefits when prime and target had different shapes) developed, indicating that primes affected the motor system. When target shape and color varied independently (control condition), no NCE occurred, in line with the assumption that the NCE reflects task set-dependent motor processes, not perceptual interactions.

The role of direct parameter specification and attentional capture in near-threshold priming of motor reactions

The priming of motor responses can be induced by preceding visual stimuli that have been made invisible by metacontrast masking ('primes'). According to the concept of direct parameter specification( DPS;Neumann,1990),strong similarity between prime and target results in the processing operations that are to be applied to the target being also induced by the prime. As targets have to be attended to, this also implies that attention is captured by the location of a prime, thereby facilitating motor priming effects. This hypothetical effect may be viewed as a form of top-down attentional capture. In some subliminal priming experiments (e.g. Jaśkowski, Skalska, & Verleger, 2003), however, attentional capture may have been unrelated to target identity, as stimuli with unique features (singletons) are known to induce bottom-up attentional capture. Three experiments were performed that largely confirmed the view that the results of these earlier experiments were due to top-down attentional capture, in line with DPS. However, the priming effect was also evoked by a singleton irrelevant to the participants' task, although this effect was weaker than in case of strong similarity between prime and target. Priming effects remained when singletons were absent from one side of the visual field, suggesting that the presence of singletons is not a requirement for the observation of motor priming effects.