Citation

Bidet-Ildei C, Sparrow L, Coello Y. Acta Psychol. 2011; 137(3): 330-334.

Affiliation

URECA (EA 1059), University of Lille-Nord de France, France; CeRCA, UMR-CNRS 6234, University of Poitiers, France.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.04.001

PMID

21514548

Abstract

In the present study, we investigate whether reading an action-word can influence subsequent visual perception of biological motion. The participant's task was to perceptually judge whether a human action identifiable in the biological motion of a point-light display embedded in a high density mask was present or not in the visual sequence, which lasted for 633ms on average. Prior to the judgement task, participants were exposed to an abstract verb or an action verb for 500ms, which was related to the human action according to a congruent or incongruent semantic relation. Data analysis showed that correct judgements were not affected by action verbs, whereas a facilitation effect on response time (49ms on average) was observed when a congruent action verb primed the judgement of biological movements. In relation with the existing literature, this finding suggests that the perception, the planning and the linguistic coding of motor action are subtended by common motor representations.

Language: en