More than a feeling: The bidirectional convergence of semantic visual object and somatosensory processing

- A vibratory hand stimulation prime led to faster reaction times to pictures of objects with hand related action affordances
- Pictures of objects with foot related action affordances were not impacted by the vibratory prime
- Viewing pictures of objects with hand related action affordances led to faster detection of hand vibratory stimulation
- Our results suggest that object semantic knowledge bidirectionally converges with the somatosensory system

Prevalent theories of semantic processing assert that the sensorimotor system plays a functional role in the semantic processing of manipulable objects. While motor execution has been shown to impact object processing, involvement of the somatosensory system has remained relatively unexplored. Therefore, we developed two novel priming paradigms. In Experiment 1, participants received a vibratory hand prime (on half the trials) prior to viewing a picture of either an object interacted primarily with the hand (e.g., a cup) or the foot (e.g., a soccer ball) and reported how they would interact with it. In Experiment 2, the same objects became the prime and participants were required to identify whether the vibratory stimulation occurred to their hand or foot. In both experiments, somatosensory priming effects arose for the hand objects, while foot objects showed no priming benefits. These results suggest that object semantic knowledge bidirectionally converges with the somatosensory system.