Limits on action priming by pictures of objects

If I show you a picture of an object with a handle and ask you to make a judgment about that object (say, whether it's right side up or not) you will be faster to respond if you use the hand closest to the handle. This is called action priming (Tucker & Ellis. 1998) and there is now a wide literature using this basic setup to investigate how the perception of affordances prepares the action system to do one thing rather than another.

There is, of course, a problem here. These studies all use pictures of objects and these are not that same as the real thing. These studies therefore don't tell us anything about how the perceived affordances of objects make us ready to act on those objects. This is only a problem because it's what these researchers think they are studying which means they don't pay attention to the nature of their stimuli. The result is a mixed bag of results.

For example, a recent article (Yu, Abrams & Zacks, 2014) set out to use this task to ask whether action priming was affected by where the hand had to go to make a response. Most tasks involve a simple button press on a keyboard, so they were interested to see whether asking people to respond using buttons on the monitor might enhance priming. The logic was that the spatial location of the response would be an even stronger match or mismatch to the location of the object's handle. However, they accidentally discovered that a) action priming is not reliably replicable and b) the factor that seems to determine whether it shows up is a confounding task demand. This again highlights just what a problem this experimental set up is.