Implied between-object actions affect response selection without knowledge about object functionality

ABSTRACT

Potential interactions between objects affect response selection in action-related object pairs. The present paper aimed to examine whether this effect is conditional on the knowledge about object functionality, or whether action-related structures such as handles are sufficient. This issue was investigated by utilizing a paradigm established previously. They presented imperative central targets which overlapped with task-irrelevant object pairs and required speeded left/right responses to the targets. With this paradigm, two stable effects of implied actions between objects on response selection have been identified: an inhibitory effect on responses aligned with the passive object (e.g., a bowl in a bowl–spoon pair) and an advantage associated with responses aligned with the active objects (e.g., a spoon). The present paper utilized these two effects as the indexes of response selection in paired-object scenarios, and found that active–passive object pairs without established functionality (e.g., a saw and a bowl, Experiment 1) generated the same effects, suggesting that response selection does not rely on functionality knowledge of given object pairs. Further, the two effects were also observed in passive–passive object pairs with handles (e.g., a cup–nail pair), but not in those without a handle (e.g., a bowl–nail pair, Experiment 2), and remained when the active objects were replaced by novel objects with handle but no known functionality (Experiment 3), suggesting that the action-related structures of objects are sufficient to affect response selection. The present study empirically illustrated the automaticity and directness of the extraction of potential interaction between objects, probably based on the relative location of action-related structure of objects.

KEYWORDS:

• Stimulus-response compatibility effect
• paired objects
• implied actions
• action possibility
• affordance

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor Glyn Humphreys, the Oxford vision group and the Birmingham Cognitive Neuroscience group for advice and discussion in experimental design and results interpretation. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the light of recent discussions concerning effect size inflation and p-hacking (e.g. Wicherts et al., 2016) we conducted a post-hoc power analysis for the two contrasts of interest (the advantage of the active objects in the correct co-location condition and the inhibition of the passive objects) based on the average effect size of these two effects across all three experiments (including the insignificant ones). We found that the present study had a power of 0.80 and 0.83 for the two effects respectively. It is worth noting that we have now replicated these two effects across three studies (see also Xu et al., 2015, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by General Financial Grant (No 2016M590055) from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation and Grant 31600925 from National Natural Science Foundation of China.