Related Experiment Videos
Rubbing your stomach while tapping your fingers: interference between motor planning and semantic judgments
B P McCloskey1, R L Klatzky, J W Pellegrino
1University of California, Santa Barbara.
Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance
|November 1, 1992
Summary
Preparing for manual tasks like finger tapping interferes with understanding action-object phrases more than vocal tasks. This suggests a limited system for representing manual actions, distinct from vocal movements.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Human Action Representation
- Semantic Processing
Background:
- Prior studies demonstrate faster sensibility judgments for action-object phrases following hand-shape cues.
- This priming effect suggests shared processing resources between action perception and cue presentation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how preparing for different tasks (manual vs. vocal) impacts facilitatory priming of action-object phrase sensibility judgments.
- To explore the nature of the cognitive system involved in representing manual actions.
Main Methods:
- Participants judged the sensibility of action-object phrases after being primed with hand-shape cues.
- Preparation involved either a manual task (finger tapping) or a vocal task (syllable vocalization) prior to the judgment task.
Main Results:
- Preparation for finger tapping significantly reduced the magnitude of the priming effect compared to syllable vocalization.
- This indicates that resources used for semantic processing of action-object phrases are also engaged during manual response preparation.
Conclusions:
- The findings support a limited cognitive system for representing manual actions, with capacity constraints.
- This system appears specialized for manual actions and distinct from the representation of vocal tract movements.