Influences of visual and action information on object identification and action production

•Identifying labels for novel object/action pairs elicits visual/action semantics.•Congruent information facilitates naming and action production.•Incongruent action information attracts naming and action errors.•Incongruent visual information deflects naming and action errors.•Naming likely occurs before actions are produced.

To evaluate the impact of semantic information elicited by labels, participants learned to identify or use novel graspable objects associated with novel actions. We identified each object/action pair with labels that elicited visual form or action semantics and varied the congruence between the label’s information and the visual form or action of novel objects. In Experiment 1, participants named objects, and in Experiment 2 they produced the action associated with objects. Generally, congruent labels facilitated performance. Furthermore, for participants who learned incongruent associations, the visual form and semantic information elicited by labels influenced performance in opposite patterns. These findings support the notion that naming may be required before actions are produced when object/action associations are novel. Our findings further support the notion that links between the structural properties of objects and their actions may already be stronger than the links between verbal labels and actions in novel object/action associations.