Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has shown that action knowledgeinfluences categorical decisions (Borghi, Flumini, Natraj &Wheaton, 2012; Chao & Martin, 2000; Iachini, Borghi &Senese, 2008; Kalénine, Shapiro, Flumini, Borghi &Buxbaum, 2013). Shipp, Vallée-Tourangeau, and Anthony,(2014) showed that action influences categorisation in aforced-choice triad task when combined with taxonomicinformation and presented within a functional context. Thepresent experiment examined whether participants wouldbe more likely to match items in a triad task based onshared actions following priming with the functionalactions of the objects. Participants engaged in the triad taskused in Shipp et al. after a priming phase where they eitherinteracted with a series of objects for their functionalcapacity (Action Priming), grouped them into categories(Taxonomic Priming) or moved them from one table toanother (Movement Priming). Items within the triads werepresented as an image either on a white background(context-lean condition) or as a functional scene with theobject being used by an agent (context-rich condition).Consistent with Shipp et al. the results showed that actionwas primarily used to base choices on the triad task whenthe action choice also shared a taxonomic relation, and waspresented in context. Additionally, participants were morelikely to select the action related item when they had beenprimed with the functional action of the objects. The resultsare discussed in terms of the transfer effect from the objectinteraction task that facilitates how the objects aresimulated (Barsalou, 1999, 2003; Yeh & Barsalou, 2006).