The influence of prime identity on the emergence of affordance effects

The present study used a visuomotor priming task to investigate whether classification responses to pairs of graspable objects are influenced by prior presentation of pictures of two human or robotic hands. Participants had to press one of two keys to discriminate whether pairs of graspable objects could be usually found in the kitchen or in the garage. The objects could be used together or not. In each pair there was an active object (i.e., the object that is actively manipulated during a specific action), presented to the right or left of the screen center. Only when the objects were preceded by two robotic hands and could be used together, responses were faster when the position of the active object and the position of the response were spatially corresponding, that is when objects appeared in standard co-locations for right-handed actions. This result demonstrates that affordance effects evoked by object pairs are influenced by the nature of motor cues present in the scene.