How Competition between Action Representations Affects Object Perception during Development

ABSTRACT

Recent evidence in adults indicates that object perceptual processing is affected by the competition between action representations. In the absence of a specific motor plan, reachable objects associated with distinct structural (grasping) and functional (using) actions (e.g., calculator) elicit slower judgments than objects associated with similar actions (e.g., ball). This effect is believed to reflect the cost entailed by the conflict between action representations. The present study aims to identify age-related changes in this conflict cost and investigate its underlying mechanisms. Five age groups from 8 to adulthood participated (n = 119). Participants performed perceptual judgments on different 3D objects in a virtual environment in order to assess their conflict cost (Experiment 1). Action priming effects and Simon effects were further assessed in the same participants as independent indices of the ability to activate action representations and to monitor conflict, respectively (Experiments 2 and 3). Experiment 1 demonstrated that the conflict cost is present in children as young as 8 and follows a non-linear, U-shaped developmental trajectory between 8 and adulthood. Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that action priming effects showed a similar U-shaped curve, whereas Simon effects were stable across age groups. Action priming effects further predicted conflict costs at 10. Results suggest that the conflict cost relies on the ability to activate action representations from visual objects, which undergoes important changes during early adolescence. The role of general conflict monitoring abilities in conflict cost development requires further investigation. The findings will fuel models of action selection and embodied views of development.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the schools in Villeneuve d’Ascq, Tourcoing, and Péronne in France for their collaboration. The authors also thank Marie-Ange Lercerf for her contribution to stimuli selection and children recruitment in elementary schools. They are grateful to Valérie De Cuyper and Stéphanie Naillon for their recruitment of middle school children.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Raw data and full scripts for analysis of the three experiments are available here: https://osf.io/cvsdu/

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Notes

¹ Note that because younger children made more errors, the proportion of trials removed declined with age. We thus verified that these variations did not affect the developmental pattern of results observed. Developmental trajectories remain the same. The supplementary analysis without error exclusion for the two additional experiments is provided on OSF (https://osf.io/cvsdu/?view_only=22cd00af678047a4aadaaf2f41a89bc7).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the French National Research Agency under Grant ANR-16-CE28-0003 and ANR-11-EQPX-0023, by European funds under Grant FEDER SCV-IrDIVE and benefitted from a regional fellowship (Hauts-de-France) to M. Godard.