Do task-irrelevant direction-associated motion verbs affect action planning? Evidence from a Stroop paradigm

Abstract

Does simply seeing a word such as rise activate upward responses? The present study is concerned with bottom-up activation of motion-related experiential traces. Verbs referring to an upward or downward motion (e. g., rise/fall) were presented in one of four colors. Participants had to perform an upward or downward hand movement (Experiments 1 and 2a/2b) or a stationary up or down located keypress response (Experiment 3) according to font color. In all experiments, responding was faster if the word's immanent motion direction matched the response (e. g., upward/up response in case of rise); however, this effect was strongest in the experiments requiring an actual upward or downward response movement (Experiments 1 and 2a/2b). These findings suggest bottom-up activation of motion-related experiential traces, even if the task does not demand lexical access or focusing on a word's meaning. © 2012 Psychonomic Society, Inc.