Do task-irrelevant direction-associated motion verbs affect action planning? Evidence from a Stroop paradigm

Does simply seeing a word such as rise activate upward responses? The present study is concerned with bottom-up activation of motion-related experiential traces. Verbs referring to an upward or downward motion (e.g., rise/fall) were presented in one of four colors. Participants had to perform an upward or downward hand movement (Experiments 1 and 2a/2b) or a stationary up or down located keypress response (Experiment 3) according to font color. In all experiments, responding was faster if the word’s immanent motion direction matched the response (e.g., upward/up response in case of rise); however, this effect was strongest in the experiments requiring an actual upward or downward response movement (Experiments 1 and 2a/2b). These findings suggest bottom-up activation of motion-related experiential traces, even if the task does not demand lexical access or focusing on a word’s meaning.