Perceiving object affordances through visual and linguistic pathways: A comparative study

Abstract

It is known that both perceiving visual objects and reading object names automatically activate associated motor codes and modulate motor responses. We examined the nature of these motor activation effects for different effectors (hands and feet), and for pictures and words, across the time course of responding. The compatibility effects elicited by objects and words were comparable for the mean effect size, both were larger for slow than for fast responses and the effects were positively correlated across the stimulus types. Our results support an embodied cognition account in which the perception of objects and words automatically activates perceptual simulations of the associated actions, suggesting that objects and words share cognitive and neural mechanisms for accessing motor codes. However, the compatibility effects for objects and words carried over across trials differently: the compatibility effect for words was sensitive to a previous response, while the effect for objects was more immune to such influence. This result suggests a stronger link between objects and actions through a visual pathway than through a linguistic pathway.