What’s in a name? The influence of verbal labels on action production in novel object/action associations

ABSTRACT

Actions are produced directly from the visual features of objects; object recognition and semantic information are not necessary for action production. However, much of that research has used familiar objects. Recent studies looking at novel object–action associations suggest that semantic information associated with labels used to identify novel object–action pairs can impact action production. Furthermore, the similarity of naming performance and action performance suggests that object recognition may occur prior to action production in response to novel objects. We examined whether naming occurred before action production in four experiments where we asked participants to learn novel object/action/label associations, and produce the action associated with each object. Our results demonstrate that removing labels diminished the impact of object similarity in action production, and are consistent with the notion that labels serve to anchor action information to visual object information during the learning process.

KEYWORDS:

• Action production
• object similarity
• action learning
• visual similarity
• object information
• name information
• action learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We re-analysed data from the learning phase without the data of these two participants: the results were identical to those obtained when their data was included.

2. To make a direct comparison between the two effects, we calculated the t-test (t(58) = 3.306, p < .001) and Cohen’s d (0.854) for the mean number of action errors in the speeded action condition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Marjorie-Young Bell Faculty fellowship, and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada discovery grant [grant number PIN-246231-07].