Effects of Viewing and Reading About Action on Visual Motion

Abstract

We routinely engage in tasks where we have to coordinate and integrate language, what we see in the world, and the actions we take in the moment. This study explored the relationships among language, action, and motion perception by assessing if priming an action (either visually or through language) can affect the way a person sees a bistable ambiguous moving object. Participants either read sentences describing an action (clockwise or counterclockwise rotation of the fingers, whole hand, or whole body), or they viewed videos depicting the types of actions described by the sentences. After each action, participants viewed a bistable ambiguous stimulus that could be seen as rotating clockwise or counterclockwise (the spinning dancer illusion) and were asked to identify the direction they saw it rotating in. It was hypothesized that participants would see the dancer moving in a way that is congruent to the direction the prime was moving in. Results showed a marginal priming effect for viewing an action, but not for hearing a sentence about an action. Furthermore, the priming effect was only stronger in the visual condition compared to the linguistic condition for whole-body and fingertip actions, but not for whole-hand grasp actions. These findings reveal that viewing an unrelated action can affect how an ambiguously moving object appears to rotate.