Representations automatically evoked by a depicted hand
Date
2022-09-02
Authors
Teskey, Morgan
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Abstract
A conflicted and contentious literature has emerged from the proposal that visuospatial information from static images can automatically trigger associated motor representations. Curiously, investigations into this visual-motor relationship have predominantly focused on images of manipulable objects, while relatively little work has made use of images of body parts- whose referents are represented directly in the motor system. Limited work has made use of hand images as task-irrelevant primes, in an effort to determine whether a hand image automatically evokes a motor representation of the viewer’s corresponding limb. The results of these studies have provided diverging evidence and have resulted in competing theoretical accounts. Here, I present results from a series of stimulus-response compatibility experiments that were designed to probe the nature of representations generated by static hand images, while also addressing potential methodological weaknesses of the previous works. The results show that both stimulus properties and task demands influence the way in which an image of a hand is coded. Notably, I provide clear evidence that motor representations can be evoked automatically by depictions of particular hand postures, but that these representations are not an automatic, ineluctable component of the general processing of any hand image. These results not only contribute to a more unified account of hand representations, but also have wider implications for our understanding of the conditions under which static displays can engage motor representations.
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Keywords
Cognition, Motor representations, Hand images