The Time Course of Response Activation with Dangerous Objects.

The action property of an object appears to function as an intrinsic part of its mental representation. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in cases where although the grasp response evoked by a visual object is irrelevant to a participant's task it still appears to be encoded. This is an affordance effect. Recent findings have shown that dangerous objects can modulate the motor system by evoking aversive affordances. However, the way the time course of response activation generated by the dangerous object develops remains unclear. To investigate this process, we used a priming paradigm that varied the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between a prime and a target. Participants were asked to judge a symbol after presentation of a dangerous object. Results showed a significant congruency effect between the affordance of the ignored object and the requisite response when the SOA was 800 and 1,200 ms, (t (29) = 4.13, p <.001; t (29) = 2.56, p <.05, respectively). However, with briefer SOAs (0 and 400 ms), this congruency effect was not observed (p s >.10). Results indicate the time course of response activation with a dangerous object are relatively long-lasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]