WORDS PRIME ACTIONS: HOW SEMANTICS AFFECT FACILITATION AND INTERFERENCE OF MOTOR PROGRAMMING

We investigated the link between semantic, action and perception. Previous researches has shown that there is a strong relation between these aspects: the comprehension of a sentence has effects on actions. Our aim Is to find out how our actions can be related to different levels of word’s meaning. In this study, we asked subjects to look on a monitor where appeared in order a word and a visual cue (after 350, 500, 650 ms) that could be up or down compared to the word. They had to move a joystick up or down while visual stimuli were presented. We divided words in different level of semantic abstractions: we used for example “get up”/“get down” that could be strongly related to motor action, or “hell”/“heaven” that could be related in a figuratively way. We found out that whether or not the action is consistent with semantic, there are effects after 500 ms. In addition, semantic categories affect facilitation and interference in two different ways. It seems that the motor preparation induced by visual cue is connected to different level of semantic abstraction, and this effect appears after 500 ms.